The ERA of 1972 no longer exists in 2024

January 19, 2025 By Jane the Actuary

So on Friday, President Joe Biden declared that the Equal Rights Amendment is henceforth adopted, following the urging of supporters, based on arguments that the constitution doesn’t have any provision for Amendment approvals setting time limits, so that the 1982 deadline was never valid. The National Archivist said, “no, it’s my job to certify amendments and I do not,” and Biden supporters said, “her role is purely ministerial,” and, well, it should be apparent that if the role of certifying... Read more

Dear Cardinal Cupich: enough with endless Capital Campaigns!

January 5, 2025 By Jane the Actuary

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From 2014 to 2015, the Archdiocese of Chicago ran a capital campaign called To Teach Who Christ Is. The Archdiocese’s purpose in the campaign was to generate $150 million for scholarships for Catholic schools, but in order to make the campaign palatable, each parish was instructed to come up with capital projects of some sort or another, so that an additional $150 million of the overall goal of $350 million was for the use of the individual parishes. (In my... Read more

How “Blind Spots” are driving up medical costs – and worse

January 5, 2025 By Jane the Actuary

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Yes, I just finished Marty Makary’s new book, the topic of which is clear from the subtitle, “When Medicine Gets It Wrong and What It Means for Our Health,” and the story he tells is grim. It’s a slim book and probably available for checkout at your local library (though I had to wait for it to come off hold) and honestly I don’t understand why his nomination for a cabinet position in the Trump administration was treated as suspicious... Read more

Ray Bradbury, Book Burning, dystopias and prognostication

December 22, 2024 By Jane the Actuary

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Who was Ray Bradbury? According to Wikipedia, he was born in 1920, spent most of his early childhood years in Waukegan Illinois, then moved to Los Angeles at the age of 14. He dreamed of being a writer from an early age, and began publishing science fiction in 1938, continuing to build his career during the wartime years because bad eyesight exempted him from the draft. In 1951, so, at the age of 31, he published The Fireman as a... Read more

Curing the Birth Dearth: Reading Hannah’s Children

November 30, 2024 By Jane the Actuary

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Why has the birth rate cratered in the “developed world” including, quite recently, the United States? The standard answer includes a heavy dose of “children used to contribute to the family’s financial well-being, as farmworkers and future caretakers in old age, now they are just a costly burden.” Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, herself the mother of 8 and also a business professor, sought to find an answer by looking at the other side of the coin: women who make the intentional... Read more

The chicken shredder, tariffs, and self-sufficiency

November 29, 2024 By Jane the Actuary

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What, you may ask, is a chicken shredder? And why do I have a photograph without a carefully sourced caption indicating the usage rights for the picture? This was a rare instance of purchasing a product advertised on Facebook, not necessarily this particular version of it but I was intrigued by the general concept of a “chicken shredder” which actually is pretty nifty: cook your chicken breast (I used the instant pot) then place it on top of the spikes,... Read more

Boys, Men, and unsuccessful solutions to the problem

October 31, 2024 By Jane the Actuary

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Some time ago, I wrote a number of blog posts about the troubles that boys and men were having in the U.S., that boys were struggling in school and men were struggling in the working world. Sadly, I mostly wrote these before I got into the practice of putting useful tags on the articles, and one of those that I can find, was before I transitions to Patheos, and the images didn’t make it. Nonetheless, in January of 2014, I... Read more

“Kamala Harris will save men’s access to porn!”

October 29, 2024 By Jane the Actuary

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No, I am not going to rant about Trump, and I’m not going to rant about Harris. To be honest, both campaigns and the candidates’ supporters appear increasingly disconnected from reality, with absurd claims that Donald Trump is going to put everyone who disagrees with him into concentration camps (the campaign twitter account @KamalaHQ is particularly egregious for distorting Trump’s statements, but many Dem pundits have used Trump’s statement that there will be a “bloodbath” among American car manufactures if... Read more

Some stray thoughts on Buffalo

September 30, 2024 By Jane the Actuary

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First, some pictures: At Badlands National Park, at sunrise: Buffalo at sunrise (own work) and at sunset: We had some more but these were my two favorites from our road trip with the two key destinations being Custer State Park and Badlands National Park, and yes, the buffalo is scratching his back on the sign. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that it took as long as it did, for the kids to be almost all out of the house, for... Read more