09:37 – We watched the final episode of Gossip Girl series five on Netflix streaming and then started Sons of Anarchy series four. Switching from a poorly-written series to a series with first-rate writing was striking. I’d also forgotten how much I like Maggie Siff.
I’m going to try to convince Barbara to take some down time this weekend. Her recent trip to the beach was obviously no vacation at all, and for the last several weeks when she’s not at work she’s been spending a lot of her free time getting her parents’ house ready to go on the market. She needs a break.
I really encourage you to get your wife to take some personal time.
I went through a similar thing with my parents passed a couple of years ago, and the mental and physical toll from the effort was quite extraordinary. Looking back it seems almost mad, but I felt an obligation and, I suppose, a reluctance to let go.
The best decision I made was to force my siblings to pay for a handyman to help me.
If I had to do it again I’d insist on this from the beginning, and ask for twice the money and time for him (I worked for free).
Nope, the water meters here in Tiny Town are not RF reading. The water department guy just left Tiny House, after taking the water meter from inside, out to the new cavity they dug for that same meter to be outside.
He told me that they have a couple test RF meters in a particular neighborhood, and the city would like to convert to them, but it is financially impossible. So they still take the cover off, read the meter with their eyes, and punch it into their portable little info-collecting device. I should be happy we do not have the expense of the RF meters, as the next town over, where a cousin lives, pays almost triple the water rate we do, and she lives on a farm at the edge of town and has a septic system, instead of city sewer. My rate is just under $50/mo for up to 3 units (meter is gone, so I cannot check what those units are, and I just looked and the bills do not even say—they just call them “units”); hers is $150/mo with no sewer charges.
I second Ed’s motion. Barbara should definitely take some personal time. Also I agree with Bob’s previous post about her “vacation” not really being a vacation.
Hopefully my mom will be moving in to an assisted living place soon. We had her already to go until she found out it cost $2600 per month. The woman can’t get out of the house, and every time I go over there I have a barely controllable urge to clean.
My mother was possibly the smartest person I knew. Now she can’t really take care of herself and can’t see that. Being intelligent, she’s deceptively good at concealing how far her capabilities have declined. The woman is a retired attorney, and I’m going to have to explain all the stuff to her about finances that I learned from reading Ray’s comments about his aunt.
She tries to give me money, and can’t understand that eventually she may need it for herself. I have a cashier’s check made payable to her that I’m going to deposit in her account after she moves into the assisted living. I know we’ll get into a fight about it, I’m wanting to get the assisted living fight out of the way first.
There are family members of mine who have gladly moved to assisted living and others that fought it. In some cases, moving in with one of the children occurred; in another the invitation was not even extended, because the spouse did not feel they could take it. There are a couple of situations that are not yet resolved, but I do not envy what you face. In my experience, when there is only one parent left, the challenge is much harder. My cousin just got my aunt and uncle into assisted living; my uncle was quite ready for the move, but aunt was not. He was able to persuade her to give it a try.
I cannot imagine my fighting such an arrangement, as the most productive time of my life was dorm living, when I had no responsibility for meals or house-cleaning, but just showed up at the proper hours in the dining room and never had to worry. I still maintain to my kids that if I were rich enough, I would have a live-in cook and house-keeper, and devote myself to my own interests without interruption, like Einstein did.
And that brings me to one recommendation for those with aging parents. Get somebody to clean house for them as early as possible. House-cleaning is the first thing they will neglect, and if you keep a relationship with that cleaning person, they can provide invaluable assessments of how the parent(s) are doing. It also gets the parents used to having someone doing something for them, so the change to assisted living is not so dramatic. In all the family cases where there have been house-cleaning people in place, the move to assisted living went on with very little opposition.
One of my cousins’ parents moved themselves to an assisted living complex over 5 years ago. That is probably too much to ask in most cases, but my cousins were sure glad they did not have to lift a finger, and there is more and more intervention going on now.
Also, with so many in the family facing this change, there are many more options of how to accomplish it. One thing that is happening, is that places are cropping up, which require nothing more than rent for an apartment which includes dorm-like food service, instead of the old give-us-all-your-assets-and-income and even then that may not be enough. One of the places here in Tiny Town operated the latter way, but had so many vacancies, that they went belly-up. The new owners made it nothing more than an apartment complex with meal and cleaning service, and now there is a waiting list to get in. There is a nurse on duty 24 hours to administer shots and talk to doctors if some event requires it. If you require a higher level of care, then you move to their nursing and therapy facility across town.
Hey OFD, have you been talking to Fred lately?
http://www.fredoneverything.net/A_Surrender.shtml
“And totalitarianism comes. This is no longer the assertion of those dropped on their heads as children. Daily we read of more weaponry for the police, more surveillance authorized by courts, more unlegislated powers for Homeland Security. Currency controls fall into place to prevent people from fleeing the country with their assets.”
“In this direction, I think, lies the future. It is perfectly possible to store every email sent, every purchase made except by cash, every withdrawal of cash; to institute airport-style “security” for trains and buses; to monitor any conversation by telephone; automatically to track cell phones and read license plates and store it all. We are close. We are very close.”
Oh my goodness. I’m not sure that Collective Socialism has been tried for 310 million people before. This will not go well.
Hey, I like the idea with the full service apartment complex. This used to be quite common, they were called boarding houses. I wonder what happened to them?
A friend of mine just moved her 88 yr old mother from assisted living in Austin to assisted living here in Sugar Land. She was having to drive to Austin each week (300+ mile round trip) to help her out. Well, now they are way, way closer but her mom is very unhappy about moving. She calls her every morning and gripes about the facility (mostly imagined slights). The net result is that my friend now sees her mom 5 or 6 days a week and is still crying as much. I am mystified as how to help.
Pillow over the face?
Well, it has happened. Pretty quickly, too. When cloud computing became all the rage a few years ago, I maintained that you would be taking a risk involving property ownership, and everyone here said, ‘Nah. The laws will protect us.’
No surprise to me, it has not turned out that way. Here’s the EFF article released on Halloween.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/governments-attack-cloud-computing
The old saying goes, ‘possession is 9/10ths of the law’. Sure looks that way. Keep your data locked up on your own premises, or give it away by putting it in the cloud. I have told the story before that The Chemical Company had servers with their financial data in an area with an air lock—first door required 2 employees to use their cards and escort me into the air lock. Second door had a physical lock on it and required somebody inside the server area to identify everyone in the group before unlocking that door to let me in. Then I had to be accompanied at all times by an IT guy. People serious about their data are not going to use the cloud, or they will lose it.
Here’s the brief filed in support of Kyle Goodwin, owner of Ohio Sports Net, which records high school athletic events and stored their video inventory on MegaUpload servers in a Premium account, to which they have been denied access by the US government.
https://www.eff.org/document/brief-interested-party-kyle-goodwin
Yeah, Lynn; I got Fred’s email earlier today and immediately forwarded it along and also linked to it on SpaceBook accordingly. The world needs to hear more of Fred.
And no, the collective socialist enterprise our corporate oligarchy is preparing for us is not going to work very well; sure, most folks will knuckle under, go along to get along, and so forth. But there are a LOT of people who will not and for every little trick of Leviathan and Behemoth, we have some of our own in the works all the time. What sucks is that our country is becoming more like Soviet Russia and Red China used to be; and they are becoming more conservative and intelligent about things like WE used to be, all so long ago.
I’m also pretty sure Leviathan is gonna try to control The Cloud but we shall see how that works out in actual practice; I note, however, that in order for me to get to our physical racks of machines where I work, I now have to badge in through the outer gate; badge again to get in the building; and NOW I gotta badge in a third time to get into the cat-walk between one building and ours, PLUS a fourth badge to get into any of the raised-floor data centers. Where I still need “root” of course. And quite often our physical presence is necessary with these machines, because they have been taking away even OUR remote login access. The truly amusing thing, though, is when outsiders roll in to do the corporate security audits on EVERYTHING; last time every last damn one of them was a foreigner who could barely speak English. I said WTF then and still say WTF.
There is more than one problem with the Cloud. The Cringe says “Think cloud computing saved you from Sandy? Think again.”
http://www.cringely.com/2012/11/01/think-cloud-computing-saved-you-from-sandy-think-again/
“Late at night last weekend, as Hurricane Sandy was beating the crap out of the eastern seaboard, I received an e-mail message from lower Manhattan. You may have received this message, too, or one just like it. It felt to me like getting a radiogram from the sinking Titanic. An Internet company was running out of diesel fuel for its generator and would shortly be dropping off the net. The identity of the company doesn’t matter. What matters is what we can learn from their experience.”
“The company had weathered power outages before and had four days of diesel fuel stored onsite. They had felt ready for Sandy. But most of their fuel wasn’t at the generator, it was stored in tanks in the building basement — a basement that was soon flooded, the transfer pumps destroyed by incoming seawater. It was like a miniature Fukushima Daiichi, not far from Wall Street.”
As with so many things, the term cloud computing has been stretched from its true meaning to something quite different. There is more to true cloud computing then just signing up with a remote service. If the service does not provide any redundancy, including having your data located in multiple locations and process it from those locations, it is not really cloud computing, just a service bureau.
Naturally The Cloud isn’t all ether and ethereal fog out there in the atmosphere like apparently all too many people seem to think; it rests on vast racks of metal forged with fossil fuels, tended by machine operator cretins like me who’ve passed some security clearance or other. And our racks of machines have been adversely affected at times by power outages (despite UPS behemoths and massive a-c units) and would also be badly affected by substantial earthquake or bomb blast. As would the aforementioned cretins.
Just saw the new program clockwheel for a couple live satellite feeds being carried by local radio stations around here. Think you are hearing more commercials today than in yesteryear? You are right. The program wheel now shows 6 minutes of commercials 4 times an hour for morning and afternoon drive. Network spot times increased from 0:60 to 0:90, and the time reserved for local spots moved from 4:00 to 4:30.
Let’s see, the one that plays music, cut the music back from 9 songs per hour to 8 to accommodate that.
In the ’60’s/’70’s, most stations followed the NAB code (a self-regulating body that eliminated self-regulation the instant the FCC deregulated the industry—don’t cha just love unrestrained free market capitalism?); the code in that era limited commercials to 2:00 blocks or 4 ‘interruptions’ aka ‘commercials’ (4 x :10 spots would max out your limit, even though it was not 2:00). I forget what the total hourly commercial load for radio was back in those days, but TV was 12:00/hr in prime-time and 18:00/hr outside of prime time—however few stations were sold out outside of prime time, except at Xmas. In that day, if they did not sell a slot, that time went to programming. These days, they put in freebie ads for non-profit causes, instead of giving unsold time back to programming. This new clockwheel brings the hourly commercial load to 24:00/hr; so that means that nearly half the time you are tuned-in will be spent listening to commercials.
Gee, just like broadcast tee-vee! How exciting! Screw all that, then; I will listen to CDs, recorded movies and TV shows I want to see, and otherwise shortwave and ham radio. And read lotsa books!
Lynn wrote:
“They had felt ready for Sandy. But most of their fuel wasn’t at the generator, it was stored in tanks in the building basement — a basement that was soon flooded, the transfer pumps destroyed by incoming seawater. It was like a miniature Fukushima Daiichi, not far from Wall Street.””
I feel the same way about outsourcing IT and other core functions: If it’s critical to your business then keep it in-house. I once went to a CICS systems programming course in Sydney, led by the lead CICS systems programmer for a major Australian bank. The bank was seriously thinking about outsourcing its IT, which the instructor thought was madness. If they lost their IT function for a week they’d probably be out of business. But they still did it.
That’s right; PHB manglers will do the most stupid thing possible, every time; won’t listen to IT vets; IT, like security, is a damnable overhead expense to these cretins. Always trying to find ways to defeat them both, nonstop.
Careful Chuck, you’re starting to sound like a populist. Or even (shock, horror) an anarchist.
One of the reasons I gave up watching TV was the commercials. They just drove me nuts. They came on more frequently, lasted longer, were repeated frequently and were more obnoxious.
Back in the Sixties, TV ads were four breaks per hour, at about two minutes each break (four ads.)
O tempora o mores!
You forgot about them turning up the sound by 3 to 5 decibels on commercials. The wife automatically mutes the tv whenever a commercial comes on. Then she unmutes and rewinds back to the restart of the programming. Me, I’m learning to read lips on the tv.
What do radio stations have to do with “unrestrained free market capitalism”, Chuck? Most stations owe their existence to the federal government seizing the electromagnetic spectrum and then renting slices of it to favored parties.
Take away the threat of oversight, and the greedy have their way with us. Remember when they sold us cable TV with the promise that there are no commercials on cable, outside of your local stations?
Someone told me recently, that one of the Popes gave a speech in Fidel-land, saying US capitalism was a culture of death. I cannot find such a quote, but it is interesting. Just about everything I enjoyed about the US is dead. Living in Germany was like stepping back to the wonderful late ’60’s and early ’70’s in the US. Unfortunately, it was like stepping back into the 1950’s as far as smoking is concerned.
Speaking of smoking, one of the advantages of the new vacancy to the west of me, is now the complete lack of cigarette smoke wafting into completely uninsulated Tiny House. There was a 4 year-old in the neighboring house, so instead of smoking in the house, the adults went out on the porch—no matter the weather—and smoked up a storm out there, which was blown directly over to my bedroom (where my desk is). Worst was when they came out in the middle of the night for a smoke. That always woke me up.
I think people should be allowed to smoke in their own home, probably. In an airtight room. People who smoke cigarettes in public should be outlawed, literally.
I think we are close to that here. The doctors’ lobby is pushing hard to outlaw smoking in all public places, including your yard/garden. Many states have already made it illegal to smoke in a car containing any baby or pre-teen youngster.
I think private property owners should be able to prohibit smoking on their premises. Otherwise, one should be able to smoke anywhere.
Regarding sending data to the cloud: Remember 40 years ago, refurbing salt mines for mag tape storage in event of the nuclear apocalypse?
Regarding shipping old folks to assisted living after yanking their car keys: No comment here, rolling 74 in two months.
You’ve got 17 more years according to my aunt and uncle’s timetable.
Magnetic tape: great for short-term use; the worst for long-term storage. Thank God for optical discs.
“You’ve got 17 more years according to my aunt and uncle’s timetable.”
Whew!!!!
New streaming faux radio station to recommend. Young college grad in Jersey, who started duplicating a defunct NYC radio station called Jammin’ 105, has broadened the playlist. Jammin’ Oldies, also known as Rhythmic, is R&B soul music aimed to attract white audiences. Sometime since I last listened, he began including more rock than just soul, and started using Philadelphia’s WPEN’s jingles. WPEN AM950 never actually played rock until the ’90’s when it became an oldies station for a short while. With Hi Hoffman’s Great Big Radio sounding pretty distorted these days, I have moved to this one:
http://67.213.221.48:9080
That is a 128kpbs stream to put in your player, but there are others at the main website:
http://jamminoldiesradio.com/?page_id=8
AAC streams are now acknowledged to be the best fidelity, if one is available. But not one in this case.
Chuck wrote:
“Magnetic tape: great for short-term use; the worst for long-term storage. Thank God for optical discs.”
Thank who? LOL
If it’s important put it on several disks and several hard drives and keep them in separate places.
And when they come up with a totally odorless, smokeless cigarette I’ll be happy with people smoking in public. Otherwise, it would probably be okay if they didn’t exhale or breath for 3-4 minutes. That could work too… 🙂
Cigars and pipes are okay in public, at least that tobacco smells okay.
I think this is actually true of electronic cigarettes. If I recall, the “smoke” is solely for psychological reasons, and is actually a glycerin-based aerosol.
My LAN backup is 1.6 TB now. Long term storage is external hard drives. One backup, one device / one media according to Jerry Pournelle. I have seven 2TB and 3TB drives that I swap weekly.
I just bought another 3TB external drive for $150 last night:
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Essential-Desktop-External/dp/B0042Z55RM/
People should be able to smoke until they harm another person. Probably 10 feet.
Actually, if you strip out the pseudo-science, there’s no credible evidence that “second-hand smoke” is harmful to normal people, let alone “third-hand smoke”.
” if you strip out the pseudo-science, there’s no credible evidence that “second-hand smoke” is harmful to normal people”
As mentioned before, there does seem to be some evidence. When the public smoking ban went into place in Switzerland, there was a nearly immediate, dramatic drop in heart attacks, including non-smokers. It is very difficult to control for all factors, when talking about lifestyle choices. Nonetheless, this seems to be strongly indicative.
Searching around a bit, I came across this:
Smoking is a well-established risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Past research shows that the risk associated with secondhand smoke exposure is about a third of that seen in active smokers.
In an effort to further clarify this risk, Venn and colleague John Britton, MD, examined established blood biomarkers of cigarette smoke exposure and heart disease risk in 7,599 adults who had never smoked. The participants were enrolled in the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III), conducted in the United States.
Sixty-eight percent of those evaluated were women, and the median age of the study participants was 38.
Blood sample analysis included measurements of cotinine, the nicotine byproduct used to measure nicotine exposure.
The researchers also examined whether nicotine exposure was associated with markers of increased heart disease risk. They did this by measuring blood levels of four markers of disease — C-reactive protein, white blood cell count, fibrinogen, and homocysteine.
Slightly less than one out of five study participants had no detectable cotinine in their blood samples, while the rest had low or high levels.
Eighteen percent of those with low blood levels of cotinine and 56% of those with high cotinine levels reported living with a smoker or being exposed to tobacco smoke at work.
Having low and high levels of cotinine was associated with a significant increase in two of the four heart disease markers, fibrinogen and homocysteine (fibrinogen is a blood clotting factor. Homocysteine is an amino acid and high levels have been linked to risk for heart, stroke, and blood vessel disease).
The association persisted even after the researchers controlled for other risk factors, including obesity, diet, physical activity level, and socioeconomic status.
As has frequently been commented upon here, correlation is not causation.
The best data source on smoking is the insurance industry’s actuarial tables, which include morbidity/mortality data on hundreds of millions of people over more than a century. Back before political correctness hit the insurance industry, for life insurance purposes anyone who smoked 10 or fewer cigarettes per day was rated as a non-smoker. That’s because their morbidity/mortality experience was indistinguishable from non-smokers. And you can believe the insurance company actuaries analyzed the shit out of these data. Interestingly, we pipe smokers actually outlive non-smokers, from which the math-ignorant would conclude that pipe smoking is good for one’s health.
Note that the insurance industry has vast data piles on non-smoking family members of smokers, and found no evidence to suggest increased morbidity/mortality among them.
Think you are hearing more commercials today than in yesteryear?
Not really. Of course it helps that I never listen to commercial radio. The public stations have about the same amount of fund raising as always, about three weeks four times a year. Fortunately I get more than one and their pledge drives usually don’t overlap. And for the moment my newly acquired car is providing satellite radio I’m not going to ever pay for.
I was thinking a indoor swimming pool would be nice in a perfect world. I have no idea what the building would cost but it would be not an incredible amount compared to lesser amount of water makeup and chemicals. And lesser varmints also. But a lot of things gotta fall in place for this to happen.
BTW, water is getting incredibly expensive down here. We are getting close to $4 per 1000 gallons and still climbing. We are switching from ground water to surface water and the treatment facilities are expensive. Houston is even talking about a desalinization plant.
I’m not sure what I pay but it’s probably near $4 per kl. As a kid I remember seeing my parents water bill in 1970: 4c per 1000 gallons. (That’s real gallons, not short-changed US gallons.)
In Adelaide building a desal plant seemed a good idea. They’re at the end of the Murray, and after the greedy eastern states have had their cut there is so little left that it often stops flowing out to sea. Recently there has been enough rain to cut water restrictions and the Murry is indeed flowing again. The state government signed up for a desal plant twice the recommended size, and now that’s looking like an enormous white elephant. They’re up for re-election in 2013 or ’14 and no one gives them much chance.
I’ll be looking for a house in Adelaide next year, and while air conditioning is essential I’m not even sure I’d want a pool for “free”.
RBT wrote:
“Actually, if you strip out the pseudo-science, there’s no credible evidence that “second-hand smoke” is harmful to normal people, let alone “third-hand smoke”.”
I wasn’t talking bout harm. I just don’t like the smell. Cigarette smokers should have to wear targets, placed over the heart. If I’m downwind of a smoker and can smell the smoke then I should be able to put them out of their addictive misery.
Roy write:
“Not really. Of course it helps that I never listen to commercial radio.”
To the best of my knowledge the only working radio I have is in my car. If one station is running ads I keep switching till I wind something I want to hear. If I don’t I switch it off.
*wind. find.
I have long questioned why the US FDA does not just ban nicotine in cigarettes. I mean, geez, how simple can a solution be?
But I’m with Greg: I don’t like the smell—at all! From the time I was a kid, it has nearly made me barf, and actually takes my breath away for a moment when I first encounter it. The recently vacated smokers’ house across the alley is at least 75 feet from mine, but one person smoking on their porch penetrates Tiny House as if there were a dozen people blowing smoke into an open window. I just hope the next occupants are not smokers. That is a little too much to expect in Tiny Town, however, as the educational level here is in the basement, and smoking is directly correlated with educational level.
As far as harming one physically, with doctors in the family, they all agree that it is obvious from their practice that it does harm. Six doctors, 3 in smoker’s paradise, Germany—one of them a smoker who admits it is bad,—and 3 in the US: that’s enough for me.
Okay, so it turns out that the stream I mentioned above as Jammin 105 is back to Rhythmic Oldies. Apparently, the guy was just giving his friend, Famous Amos, a little exposure for his WPEN stream. Here is the real 95PEN stream:
http://173.193.20.157:7020
No commercials and lots less processing than the Jammin 105 stream. Over-processing is one of those things that everyone seems to be doing these days—from CD’s to radio to TV. Very fatiguing to listen to, and the studies are clear on that, but the industry ignores them.
OFD quit the ciggies in 1978 and smoked only a pack a day for a few years; don’t care for the secondhand smoke but also don’t care for the uber-PC corporate and gummint self-appointed Gestapo rousting people and exiling them to the far corners of the corporate office park in the dead of winter. Too many people seem to get pleasure out of persecuting others and making life miserable for them.
Well, doctors used to agree that bleeding patients was a good idea. Anecdotes are not evidence. I trust a data pile that covers morbidity/mortality experience of at least tens of millions of people over more than a century, the compilers of which had no hidden agenda.
You will still find many, perhaps most, physicians telling pregnant women that consuming any alcohol at during their pregnancies is horribly dangerous for the fetuses. Wrong. Utterly wrong. There is zero evidence to support that claim. FAS occurs in mothers who are drunks, not in mothers who drink socially. If anything, moderate alcohol consumption might actually be good for the fetus, as it is for the mother.
Chuck wrote:
“I don’t like the smell—at all! From the time I was a kid, it has nearly made me barf, and actually takes my breath away for a moment when I first encounter it.”
I don’t remember liking or not liking the smell when I was a kid. Between the ages of 10 and 15 I furtively smoked about two packets, total. Then I stopped. I don’t remember when I grew to hate the smell, but it is very annoying to have to hold one’s breath as one goes in and out of the office, because the smokers congregate at the entrance – they’ve had to go outside to smoke since the late Eighties.
I had a few puffs on a cigar about 30 years ago, which didn’t bother me. I’ve sat near pipe smokers and that hasn’t bothered me. It’s just cigarette smoke that really annoys me.
My father took up smoking in WWII, at the suggestion of the RAAF, and smoked till 1965, when he went cold turkey. Within a few months he couldn’t stand to be near smokers.
When I’m out in public I always have the radar on, searching for smokers, so I can give them a wide berth. I resent having to do that.
RBT wrote:
“If anything, moderate alcohol consumption might actually be good for the fetus, as it is for the mother.”
I remember you saying a few years ago that consumption of something rather more, ah, personal, might be good for a woman during pregnancy… 🙂
Chuck wrote:
” I just hope the next occupants are not smokers. That is a little too much to expect in Tiny Town, however, as the educational level here is in the basement, and smoking is directly correlated with educational level.”
In the Seventies cigarette ads in Australia had to have a warning following them: “Medical authorities warn that smoking is a health hazard.”
Governments loved to impose “sin” taxes on tobacco, booze, etc and after one heavy hit a journalist remarked that tobacco usage was also a wealth hazard. As far as I am concerned they can bring it on – I’d rather the government have the dough than the suckers. If people can afford to smoke then they obviously don’t need social security, so I’d take that off them too.
Barbara feels the same way. When we got married, I smoked cigarettes. I didn’t smoke in the house. Then one very cold winter I had the flu and was standing out on the front porch attempting to smoke a cigarette. It was so cold, about -6F (-21 C) that I couldn’t actually get any smoke. As I drew on the cigarette, the good stuff would all condense on the paper above the burning tip. So I accidentally quit smoking. Barbara actually encouraged me to take up a pipe.
Yes, it’s true. A pregnant women who swallows semen regularly has a much lower likelihood of experiencing pre-eclampsia, a condition that has killed a lot of pregnant women and fetuses. I remember years ago reading a popular press article about it. Barbara and I were having dinner with Paul and Mary when I told them about the article. We drew a lot of attention in the restaurant when we all started laughing uproariously. The punch line was that the article didn’t bother to mention that it had to be her partner’s semen she was swallowing.
Vaginal exposure to her partner’s semen also works, but swallowing is much more effective. And ideally, this exposure should be frequent and regular for months to years before the woman conceives.
I have long questioned why the US FDA does not just ban nicotine in cigarettes. I mean, geez, how simple can a solution be?
Don’t look at the FDA, look at Congress. The FDA wasn’t given authority to regular tobacco until 2009.
And it’s ridiculous that the FDA has any authority whatsoever over tobacco. It is not consumed as a food, nor is it consumed as a drug.
It is not only ridiculous but unconstitutional that the FDA exists at all. I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress to regulate the food consumed by individual citizens.
Or drugs, for that matter. They had to pass a Constitutional Amendment to allow the federal government to regulate alcohol.
“…ideally, this exposure should be frequent and regular for months to years before the woman conceives.”
Needless to say, we do not, and never will, live in this ideal situation. Most of us, anyway, YMMV.