Previous studies have hinted at the importance of fathers in child-rearing. Some have shown that girls reach puberty younger, become sexually active earlier and are more likely to get pregnant in their teens if their father was absent when they were young. Others have suggested that the sons of absent fathers display lower intimacy and self-esteem.
Now let’s get the new stuff:
Cells in pups deprived of fathers had a blunted response to oxytocin – the “cuddle chemical”, which is normally released during social interactions and pair bonding. They also had an increased response to NMDA, which is involved in memory.
The fatherless mice were also less interested in engaging with other mice. “Usually if you put two animals in the same cage they investigate and touch each other, but when we put two animals deprived of a father together they ignored each other,” says Gobbi. Her colleague Francis Bambico presented the work at the World Congress of Biological Psychiatry in Paris, France, in early July.
But according to this Telegraph article, it doesn’t seem as though research impacts public policy. (H/T Andrew)
Excerpt:
Women who undergo fertility treatment and their same-sex partners are now both allowed to register as parents on their baby’s birth certificates.
The move has been criticised for damaging the traditional notion of a family, which many people say is necessary for a healthy upbringing.
But ministers insist it is a step forward for equal rights.
Lord Brett, the Home Office Minister, said: “This positive change means that for the first time female couples who have a child using fertility treatment have the same rights as their heterosexual counterparts to be shown as parents in the birth registration.
“It is vital that we afford equality wherever we can in society, especially as family circumstances continue to change. This is an important step forward in that process.”
There are powerful special interest groups on the left whose whole purpose is to demonize fathers and destroy marriage. They want children to be raised by the state, (i.e. – by those who run the secular government). They think that government programs taught by strangers and designed by experts well-versed in all the isms of the left, are better for children than their biological parents.
Here’s what the Washington Post said after Bush’s tax cuts lowered the unemployment rate to 5.4%:
For President Bush, tax cuts have been an all-purpose elixir, a cure for budget surpluses and a bursting stock bubble, for terrorist attacks and boardroom scandals, for the march to war and a jobless recovery in peacetime.
Now, after three successive tax cuts, and after a record budget surplus has turned to a record deficit, the president faces an unenviable choice. He can either concede that his $1.7 trillion tonic has not worked as advertised, or he can insist that the economy is strong despite the slowdown in growth and job creation.
Bush cut taxes on the most productive job-creating parts of the economy by 2.2 trillion overall in his two terms.
But what about Obama? The Post writes:
The big news of the week should be Friday’s employment report, which many analysts suspect will show that the labor market, while still quite bad, continues on a path toward stabilization. Economists are expecting the unemployment rate to rise to 9.5 percent, from 9.4 percent, and for employers to have cut 228,000 net jobs in August, compared with the 247,000 jobs lost in March. That job loss number — or even better, a figure that starts with a “1,” would be strong evidence that improvement in the economy is finally filtering through to the job market in a serious way.
But there are reasons to doubt that will happen. Most notably, the rate of new jobless claims has failed to come down significantly in recent weeks, which suggests businesses are still eager to pare back their payrolls. Thursday, the Labor Department said 570,000 Americans put in new claims for unemployment insurance benefits, down only barely from 580,000 the previous week.
Surprise! Communism is bad for the economy! Who knew?
Economics in One Lesson
We are going to have to pay for all this spending on Obama’s favored special interest groups eventually, and that means that taxes will go up, or that the value of the dollar will go down, due to inflation. It has to be one or the other or both. There is no third way.
Perhaps it is time to review Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, chapter 4, entitled “Public Works Mean Taxes”.
Excerpt:
Therefore, for every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else. We can see the men employed on the bridge. We can watch them at work. The employment argument of the government spenders becomes vivid, and probably for most people convincing. But there are other things that we do not see, because, alas, they have never been permitted to come into existence. They are the jobs destroyed by the $10 million taken from the taxpayers. All that has happened, at best, is that there has been a diversion of jobs because of the project. More bridge builders; fewer automobile workers, television technicians, clothing workers, farmers.
And consider Chapter 5 as well, entitled “Taxes Discourage Production”.
In our modern world there is never the same percentage of income tax levied on everybody. The great burden of income taxes is imposed on a minor percentage of the nation’s income; and these income taxes have to be supplemented by taxes of other kinds. These taxes inevitably affect the actions and incentives of those from whom they are taken. When a corporation loses a hundred cents of every dollar it loses, and is permitted to keep only fifty-two cents of every dollar it gains, and when it cannot adequately offset its years of losses against its years of gains, its policies are affected. It does not expand its operations, or it expands only those attended with a minimum of risk. People who recognize this situation are deterred from starting new enterprises. Thus old employers do not give more employment, or not as much more as they might have; and others decide not to become employers at all. Improved machinery and better-equipped factories come into existence much more slowly than they otherwise would. The result in the long run is that consumers are prevented from getting better and cheaper products to the extent that they otherwise would, and that real wages are held down, compared with what they might have been.
There is a similar effect when personal incomes are taxed 50, 60 or 70 percent. People begin to ask themselves why they should work six, eight or nine months of the entire year for the government, and only six, four or three months for themselves and their families. If they lose the whole dollar when they lose, but can keep only a fraction of it when they win, they decide that it is foolish to take risks with their capital. In addition, the capital available for risk-taking itself shrinks enormously. It is being taxed away before it can be accumulated. In brief, capital to provide new private jobs is first prevented from coming into existence, and the part that does come into existence is then discouraged from starting new enterprises. The government spenders create the very problem of unemployment that they profess to solve.
What Obama did, in effect, is to fire all of those millions of private sector people, so that he could reward the people who voted for him. And jobs are created far more efficiently by small businesses than they are by big government. This is the science of economics.
Let’s drop the Peter-Pan politically-correct policies of the left, and elect Republicans in 2010.
Hospitals in border cities, including Detroit, are forging lucrative arrangements with Canadian health agencies to provide care not widely available across the border.
Agreements between Detroit hospitals and the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care for heart, imaging tests, bariatric and other services provide access to some services not immediately available in the province, said ministry spokesman David Jensen.
The agreements show how a country with a national care system — a proposal not part of the health care changes under discussion in Congress — copes with demand for care with U.S. partnerships, rather than building new facilities.
I am not so sure that we should be adopting single-payer health care. Who can we cut a deal with to reduce our waiting list delays?
WINTERY KNIGHT 