What I'm Reading: Kids and Family Edition | The Dog Ate My Wallet

Today, we get to babysit a toddler for friends. The little angel demon (I know this child) will arrive around noon and will be at our house until tomorrow morning. C and I are both looking forward to it. When her mom asked if she could stay the night (so that mom and dad could not only have an afternoon, but a whole night to themselves) and I said yes without a second?s hesitation, she asked ?are you sure?? Here?s the thing- we want to adopt. If we can?t handle one night with a child who meets all of my ideal qualifications- verbal, mobile, potty trained ?then we?re in trouble. No, we?re both looking forward to having her over.

And that gives rise to today?s theme for what I?m reading. It?s the kids and family edition.

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Let?s start with Broke-Ass Mommy. This post isn?t so much about her daughter, but it is about family relationships, and how her husband recently saved her from both a bat and a snake, enough to give anyone a case of the A-Weebie-Jeebies. I had to laugh, because growing up in a rural area, my cats had been known to bring both into the house- dead or alive.

Jana of Daily Money $hot got to spend the summer being a stay at home mom for the first time- and she was good at it. One of the lessons she took away from the summer? Lessons for our kids pay off, in more than just the obvious ways. She writes My kid?s love of swimming could help with her financial future, and she does this without once mentioning the prize money from a future Olympic gold medal. What a grounded mom she is.

Debt Black Hole is a place for personal finance and geek culture to meet, so obviously I?m a fan. To make me more of a fan, this week, there was a guest post from my good friend Average Joe (and he was everywhere this week) about How Board Games Help Your Pocketbook and Financial Planning, but what it?s really about is how board games can bring a family together in a fun and interactive way. You can bet there will be game nights at our house.

Andrea at So Over This has written a lot about her struggles parenting a child with Asperger?s Syndrome. But her dilemma this week comes from another family member- an adult who doesn?t seem to want to do anything to help herself. It begs the question- How Far Would You Go For Family?

And finally, we get to my favorite family/parenting oriented blog, Another Housewife. It appears that she?s having some database issues going on right now, but I hope she gets them fixed soon. Am I Sorry? Nope (this link may take you to an error message on the blog) is all about how none of us should apologize for things we?re not sorry for. In this case, she?s talking about how she and her husband choose to raise their kids. Their rules and goals are not a judgment on the rest of us, they are just what works best for their family. And you know what, even though I will likely raise a child quite a bit differently than they do, I agree. You do what works for your family, and don?t apologize to the world for being who you are.

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And would you believe- we didn?t get a new Yakezie Challenger this week. But that?s okay. I just headed over to the list of all Yakezie Member/Challenger blogs and looked for one I hadn?t read before. Given our theme, I figured Mom?s Plans would fit in perfectly. And I was right. I?m highlighting Melissa?s third update in her Organic Thrifty Food Grocery Challenge. C and I aren?t just starting to eat better because I want to lose weight, but because we want to make the budget shift to mostly organic foods by the time there?s a kid in the picture. For the most part, the chemicals in foods won?t do much to us as adults (and we?re already full of them) but they might cause issues with kids, so we?re looking to make changes. Having a guide along the way can never hurt.

Source: http://erinshanendoah.com/dogatemywallet/?p=913&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=what-im-reading-kids-and-family-edition

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Finding a Painter in Orlando for Your Painting Needs

Choices for updating the look of your home are numerous these days. Deciding whether or not you want to hire painters in Orlando to help you improve the look of your house will be something you want to consider. There might be a number of reasons why you are considering a specific painter in Orlando today.

When budgeting for a painter in Orlando to complete this type of work, you will want to know the total cost as well as any payment schedule that might be found with that particular provider. Some will require that you make regular payments that are intended to insure that they can afford the materials. At the same time they might also be concerned that the full balance will not be paid when the work is done.

Hiring an exterior home painter can help you get the outside of the home looking nice for whatever reason. Deciding on a provider to do this work can be determined based on cost alone or you might have some additional concerns regarding the completion time as well as the workers who will be coming to your home. Having the work done properly is a factor as well as completing it in a timely manner.

Available choices for these services might be numerous however there might be considerations for special work that may be needed for the outside of your home. When you are looking for this particular service you may want to also ask questions about the equipment that they might require you provide. Additionally you want to know how long it will take to finish the job.

Many different things will need to be looked at when you are considering various organizations to do the work. There are factors that you need to consider such as the overall cost and the estimated time to complete the project. However there are other factors too such as the payment schedule, prep work and your input that need to be looked at as well.

Finding a painter in Orlando to provide you with the services you need can be a tough decision. There are a number of options available when you are searching for painters in Orlando. Finding the one that fits all of your needs will be very important.

Selecting a painter in Orlando can be a rather long process as well. You need to determine which can provide the services within the budget you have planned as well as on the schedule you need. Once you have narrowed the choices down to only a few, you can begin to look deeper into the options and make your final decision.

About Us: When looking for painter in Orlando, you will find there are many choices. If you are searching for the highest quality along with the best price, you might consider looking at Painters Orlando for your next contracting project. Visit them online at www.PaintersOrlando.com for more information or to set up an appointment.

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Charles Krauthammer: Israel takes no comfort in the deterrence theory with Iran

There are few foreign-policy positions more silly than the assertion without context that "deterrence works." It is like saying air power works. Well, it worked for Kosovo; it didn't work over North Vietnam.
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It's like saying city-bombing works. It worked in Japan 1945 (Tokyo through Nagasaki). It didn't in the London blitz.
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The idea that some military technique "works" is meaningless. It depends on the time, the circumstances, the nature of the adversaries. The longbow worked for Henry V. At El Alamein, however, Montgomery chose tanks.
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Yet a significant school of American "realists" remains absolutist on deterrence and is increasingly annoyed with those troublesome Israelis who are sowing fear, rattling world markets and risking regional war by threatening a pre-emptive strike to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Don't they understand that their fears are grossly exaggerated? After all, didn't deterrence work during 40 years of Cold War?
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Indeed, a few months ago, columnist Fareed Zakaria made that case by citing me writing in defense of deterrence in the early 1980s at the time of the nuclear freeze movement. And yet now, writes Zakaria, Krauthammer (and others on the right) "has decided that deterrence is a lie."
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Nonsense. What I have decided is that deterring Iran is fundamentally different from deterring the Soviet Union. You could rely on the latter but not on the former.
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The reasons are obvious and threefold.

1). The nature of the regime

Did the Soviet Union in its 70 years ever deploy a suicide bomber? For Iran, as for other jihadists, suicide bombing is routine. Hence the trail of self-immolation from the 1983 Marine barracks attack in Beirut to the Bulgaria bombing of July 2012. Iran's clerical regime rules in the name of a fundamentalist religion for whom the hereafter offers the ultimate rewards. For Soviet communists ? thoroughly, militantly atheistic ? such thinking was an opiate-laced fairy tale.
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For all its global aspirations, the Soviet Union was intensely nationalist. The Islamic Republic sees itself as an instrument of its own brand of Shiite millenarianism ? the messianic return of the "hidden Imam."??
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It's one thing to live in a state of mutual assured destruction with Stalin or Brezhnev, leaders of a philosophically materialist, historically grounded, deeply here-and-now regime. It's quite another to be in a situation of mutual destruction with apocalyptic clerics who believe in the imminent advent of the Mahdi, the supremacy of the afterlife and holy war as the ultimate avenue to achieving it.
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The classic formulation comes from Tehran's fellow (and rival Sunni) jihadist al-Qaeda: "You love life and we love death." Try deterring that.
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2). The nature of the grievance.
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The Soviet quarrel with America was ideological. Iran's quarrel with Israel is existential. The Soviets never proclaimed a desire to annihilate the American people. For Iran, the very existence of a Jewish state on Muslim land is a crime, an abomination, a cancer with which no negotiation, no coexistence, no accommodation is possible.
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3). The nature of the target.
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America is a nation of 300 million; Israel, 8 million. America is a continental nation; Israel, a speck on the map, at one point eight miles wide. Israel is a "one-bomb country." Its territory is so tiny, its population so concentrated that, as Iran's former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has famously said, "application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world." A tiny nuclear arsenal would do the job.
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In U.S.-Soviet deterrence, both sides knew that a nuclear war would destroy them mutually. The mullahs have thought the unthinkable to a different conclusion. They know about the Israeli arsenal. They also know, as Rafsanjani said, that in any exchange Israel would be destroyed instantly and forever, whereas the ummah ? the Muslim world of 1.8 billion people whose redemption is the ultimate purpose of the Iranian revolution ? would survive damaged but almost entirely intact.
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This doesn't mean that the mullahs will necessarily risk terrible carnage to their country in order to destroy Israel irrevocably. But it does mean that the blithe assurance to the contrary ? because the Soviets never struck first ? is nonsense. The mullahs have a radically different worldview, a radically different grievance and a radically different calculation of the consequences of nuclear war.
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The confident belief that they are like the Soviets is a fantasy. That's why Israel is contemplating a pre-emptive strike. Israel refuses to trust its very existence to the convenient theories of comfortable analysts living 6,000 miles from its Ground Zero.
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Charles Krauthammer is a columnist for the Washington Post.

Source: http://postbulletin.com/news/stories/display.php?id=1506944

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Democrats encounter bumps on the road to Charlotte (The Arizona Republic)

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Facebook cracks down on fake 'Likes'

10 hrs.

Alexei Oreskovic , Reuters

Facebook is weeding out fake "Likes" on its social network that are being caused by spammers, malware and black marketeers as it strives to maintain credibility as an advertising platform.

Facebook said the number of Likes, or endorsements by users, on corporate pages is likely to drop by less than 1 percent, on average, after the crackdown.

"Newly improved automated efforts will remove those Likes gained by malware, compromised accounts, deceived users, or purchased bulk Likes," Facebook said in a post on its official blog on Friday.

"While we have always had dedicated protections against each of these threats on Facebook, these improved systems have been specifically configured to identify and take action against suspicious Likes," the post continued.

Thanks to a growing black market, companies can instantly raise their profile on Facebook by purchasing thousands of Likes at a time ? a practice that is forbidden by the No. 1 social network, which has 955 million users.

Many of these Likes come from bogus Facebook user accounts rather than genuine users of the social network.

Meanwhile, various spam-like programs on Facebook deceive users into unwittingly liking something when they perform another action, such as clicking to watch a video.

Facebook said the cleanup will benefit both users and companies that maintain pages on the network, by giving a more accurate measurement of fan count and demographics.

Ensuring the integrity of Likes is serious business for Facebook, which depends on advertising revenue from large brands and other businesses. Many of the ad campaigns that companies conduct on Facebook are designed to garner Likes ??a sign that their marketing message has resonated with consumers.

"It's their currency," said Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at research firm Altimeter Group. "Facebook is playing the Federal Reserve, to take the counterfeit currency off the market to ensure that there's quality in the marketplace."

The problem is not unique to Facebook, say analysts, who note that Twitter and Google also grapple with fake accounts, spam and other techniques to game the service.

But for Facebook, the pressure to show that activity on its social network is genuine has grown as concerns have mounted on Wall Street about the company's long-term profit potential.

Facebook estimates that 1.5 percent of its users are "undesirable" accounts set up for purposes that violate its terms of service, according to its most recent 10-Q regulatory filing.

"I think what they're intending to do is get a handle on it before it gets really out of control," Brian Blau, an analyst with research firm Gartner, said.

"You can imagine no business wants to pay for advertising to fake accounts."?

(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2012. Check for restrictions at:?http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp?

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/gadgetbox/facebook-cracks-down-fake-likes-974514

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The science behind our weirdest behaviours

Jessica Hamzelou, contributor

YOU might not have noticed, but the face a person makes when they sneeze or yawn is remarkably similar to the one they pull at orgasm. Similarly, being prevented from completing any of these three actions once they are under way is extremely frustrating. Are they linked in their function?

In Curious Behavior, neuroscientist Robert Provine discusses common yet seemingly strange actions, such as crying, tickling and yawning - subjects often overlooked by science. Beyond explaining how each of these actions work anatomically, Provine explores their functions, similarities and whether they might be linked by some higher, social purpose.

The most fascinating chapters involve descriptions of what happens when these behaviours become extreme. Take the 1962 outbreak of contagious laughter in Tanganyika, now Tanzania, which affected around a thousand people over several years. Then there is the story of a woman with an itch so severe she scratched through to her brain in her sleep.

Provine's investigations also reveal captivating insights into the mundane. Why are humans the only creatures to produce emotional tears, for instance, and what are they for? It may be that tears contain an ingredient that acts to soothe us, which is why we cry when we are sad. But the fact that teary eyes are universally recognised as a symbol of sadness suggests they have a role in communication, too. Then there is the finding that the scent of a woman's tears renders her less attractive to men. Until someone definitively works out what emotional tears are doing, it seems all we can really conclude is that tear-jerker movies are a bad choice for a date.

When it comes to yawning, Provine says there is scant evidence for the accepted wisdom that yawns give the brain an oxygen boost. But they have myriad other possible functions. As I experienced while reading the chapter, yawns are so contagious that just thinking about them is enough to set some people off. Such contagious yawns have been linked to empathy. Does this mean they have a social function? Might they synchronise group activity? Or do they just signal boredom?

These endless possibilities demonstrate how, while Provine's fun exploration of these topics raises interesting questions, it fails to answer many of them, simply because the science hasn't progressed far enough. So Provine encourages readers to start their own small-scale research.

Follow his advice, and Curious Behavior will leave you trying to yawn with clenched teeth, sneeze with your eyes open and noticing just how often you laugh at things that really aren't funny.

Book information
Curious Behavior: Yawning, laughing, hiccupping, and beyond by Robert R. Provine
Belknap Press
?18.95/$24.95

Come back, parasites, all is forgiven

Courtney Humphries, contributor

IN NOVEMBER 2010, science writer Moises Velasquez-Manoff went to a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, to be infected with 30 flesh-burrowing hookworm larvae. This dubious act had a purpose: Velasquez-Manoff has eczema, asthma, allergies and alopecia universalis - an autoimmune disease that causes total body hair loss. This controversial new treatment purports to alleviate these conditions by infecting people with the very parasites humans have long fought to eradicate.

In An Epidemic of Absence, Velasquez-Manoff chronicles his experience with worm treatment. Eventually his allergies dwindle, fine hairs sprout and his eczema disappears. He also explores the underground community using parasites to try to treat asthma, Crohn's disease and autism.

He sprints adeptly through an exhaustive account of the immune system and our failure to grasp its complexities. We banished infections with sanitation and medicine, he says, but now have to face the consequences: overactive immune systems and a host of new conditions.

The examples of immunity out of balance are striking. In Karelia, an area split between Finland and Russia, for instance, the incidence of type 1 diabetes, coeliac disease and allergies is greater on the Finnish side where water is sanitised.

So does the immune system need the invaders it was designed to defend against? Velasquez-Manoff thinks so. The last 150 years of germ warfare were overkill, he argues, and now we need an "ecosystem restoration project" to bring back the microbes and parasites we evolved with.

Book information
An Epidemic of Absence: A new way of understanding allergies and autoimmune diseases by Moises Velasquez-Manoff
Scribner
$28

Science's greatest critic is no mood to recant

Graham Lawton, deputy magazine editor

WITH the Higgs in the bag and a NASA rover on Mars, all would seem to be tickety-boo in the house of science. But if Rupert Sheldrake is to be believed, these triumphs are merely final hurrahs. Despite all of its achievements, science - or the materialist world view that underpins it - is at crisis point.

This is familiar territory for Sheldrake, who has been writing materialism's obituary for the best part of 30 years - unarguably a period of great progress. Now 70, he is in no mood to recant.

Sheldrake's main argument is that while materialism was once useful, it has hardened into dogmas that are holding knowledge back. If science wants to become "freer, more interesting and more fun" it needs to abandon assumptions that, for example, matter is unconscious, the laws of nature are fixed, minds are confined to brains and psychic phenomena don't exist.

Sheldrake calls this "radical scepticism", but to me it looks like woolly credulousness. In chapter after chapter, he seizes on any hint that materialism isn't delivering, such as the failure to explain consciousness, while uncritically embracing all kinds of fringe ideas, from parapsychology and eastern mysticism to his pet hypothesis of morphic resonance.

He does land a few punches, notably when criticising entrenched methodological flaws such as the file drawer problem, in which negative results remain unpublished. But the overall impression is of an end-of-career album by a cultish band - full of familiar riffs that will satisfy loyal fans but with little chance of winning over any new ones.

Book information
Science Set Free by Rupert Sheldrake
Deepak Chopra Books
$26

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Southern Hospitality and One Bad-Ass Cat ? Epicurean Eva

So many birthdays in August that it seems as if we have been celebrating and traveling all month! Actually, we have traveled to thirteen states in thirty days!

A couple of weeks ago we were back in North Carolina.

We were met in the driveway by Nate, one bad-ass southern cat.

Visits with family seem a more precious now that we live further away. Whether taking a dip in Steve and Fran?s pool, Steve treating us to the latest ?granola? coffee-house (he thinks I?m a little, um?earthy?), or the larger gatherings with the kids playing badminton in the yard and food and drink flowing freely, I cherish these times.

Sitting in Charlotte?s kitchen sipping a cup of French pressed coffee while watching her prepare a big spread for a big family birthday celebration. She and her husband Bob, her sous-chef, didn?t need my help so I enjoyed the southern hospitality, kicked back and relaxed.

One of my favorite southern dishes that I look forward to while visiting Charlotte are the divine grits she cooks up.

Over the top rich and creamy, this is not something I would indulge in often, but as I am a believer of all things in moderation, I enjoyed this tasty treat without guilt.

GARLIC GRITS (Recipe given to Charlotte by her Grandmother Bruton, Christmas 1963)

INGREDIENTS

2 cups grits (I love Bob?s Red Mill Organic Corn Meal)
1 1/2 quarts water
1/2 cup milk
3/4 of a 16oz block of?Velveeta cheese(12 oz), cut into small cubes*
1/8 tsp garlic powder
4 eggs, beaten
1 stick butter, cut into small cubes*
1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese

* See chef?s notes at bottom of post.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Bring water to a boil. Slowly, add grits to boiling water and cook until thick. Add milk, Velveeta, and garlic powder until combined. Mix in eggs and butter, season with salt and black pepper to taste.

Pour into a buttered 9 x 13 casserole dish. Sprinkle with parmesan cheese and bake for 35 minutes.

8-10 servings

Notes: Trying to cut down the fat in this recipe, I made it with half of the butter and used a mixture of cheddar and colby/jack cheese (1-1/2 to 2 cups of grated cheese) instead of Velveeta. I also added a couple of tablespoonfuls of diced green chiles.

Source: http://epicureaneva.com/2012/08/30/southern-hospitality-and-one-bad-ass-cat/

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