OK, this is totally the best line I read anywhere about the Petraeus affair:

Petraeus. Broadwell. Kelley. Allen. Love triangle . . . quadrangle. Whatever. Except. It’s not. A “love” whatever. Let’s acknowledge all the people we know for sure have been hurt so far: betrayed spouses and children; extended family; friends and colleagues, even neighbors.

When I imagined those betrayed and hurt neighbors, I almost fell over with laughter. Just picture a burly 50-year-old neighbor approaching Petraeus and telling him in a wounded voice that oozes reproach: “I always thought that if you were going to screw somebody on the side, you’d pick me. We have such a tight-knit community, yet you have to go and fuck this outsider. I always knew you were a loser, ever since your dog peed on my lawn.”

Betrayed children also sound funny in this context. Has there been any new development where Petraeus officially repudiated his own children and adopted Broadwell’s kids instead?

Read the rest of the linked article for an example of terrifying prudery.

How often do medical and obstetric society members actually engage with the home birth or the larger birth advocacy communities? Likewise, how often are home birth advocates invited to speak to a medical society, serve on a study group, or participate in the writing of a position statement? This insularity on each side fosters stereotyping of opponents, for example, the repeated referral by home birth opponents to certified professional midwives as “lay midwives.”

I’d say about just as often as snakeoil peddlers are invited to the conferences of actual doctors of medicine and as often as biologists allow creationists to participate in writing their position statements.

The reluctance of legitimate scholars to engage in debates with crazy charlatans is to the credit of said scholars. It is kind of weird to accuse them of not wasting their time on dangerous idiots.

The Agriculture Department, which publishes an annual report on what American parents spend on their children, estimated in 2011 that a middle-income couple spent $12,290 to $14,320 a year on a child, depending on the child’s age and where they lived.

OK, this is good news. Divided by two partners, this means that a child costs one of them only about $7K per year. Eminently doable. Given that there is absolutely nowhere you can invest this money to get any sort of return nowadays while a child will feed you for decades after you reach old age, this is actually a phenomenal investment.

Of course, the stupid, hysteria-mongering NYTimes sees this as “expensive”, “extreme” and “enormous”, but what do you expect from from the mainstream media?

Yesterday, Ian Welsh, a progressive blogger demonstrated that his fake Liberalism is based on a profoundly sexist worldview. Today, the Last Psychiatrist, one of the most intelligent bloggers I’m aware of, also came up with an extremely sexist statement:

 Like a woman who squandered her youth on fun but disreputable men, she will find herself at 45 wanting to marry, but alone.  “That is such a disgusting, sexist, archaic thing to say.”  I feel your rage, and you are right.  Alone nevertheless.

As much as the Last Psychiatrist wants to believe that the universe punishes women for spending their youth having sex with everybody except for the likes of him, this punishment never comes. Sexually fulfilled women are in extraordinarily high demand on the marriage market. As one of the women who don’t believe their youth was “squandered” on having fun, I can assure the Last Psychiatrist that he can stop worrying about us right now. All of the people I dated were chosen by me on the basis of their fun potential and not on their reputation, whatever that is supposed to mean. And in spite of never even wanting to get married, I am now a blissfully happy married woman.

The Last Psychiatrist should probably stop watching all those reruns of Sex and the City and meet some real women. I’m sure that many surprising revelations await him.

I’m even happier that Romney lost the election than I was before because now it turns out that his understanding of the president’s role is completely wrong:

“With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest was a big gift,” Mr. Romney said. “Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents’ plan, and that was a big gift to young people. They turned out in large numbers, a larger share in this election even than in 2008.”

All of these things would qualify as a “gift” if Obama had used his personal funds to purchase them for said groups of people. He didn’t, though. The money for these initiatives came out of the funds contributed by the taxpayers. All Obama did was manage the taxpayers’ money (which is actually a huge part of his job description) in a way that the majority of taxpayers approved. This approval was demonstrated at the voting polls on November 6.

When a manager of a mutual fund manages the customers’ money well and offers them a good return on the investment, you’d have to be very deluded to believe that this return is the manager’s gift to the fund’s customers.

It is sad and also quite scary that a presidential candidate, even one who did not have a chance of winning, sees taxpayers’ money as some sort of a private trust fund belonging to the president that the president can throw around in the form of gifts. We have already seen what this approach did to our economy when President Bush Jr. gave gifts to the tune of trillions of dollars to his Wall Street buddies.

OK, this is getting to bizarre. For the fourth day in a row, some weirdo is scouring the blog for posts that contain words “hate men.” Now “despise men” has been added to the mix. Here is proof, in case you don’t believe me:

Buddy, seriously, give it up already. Such posts don’t exist on my blog. As much as you might want to need to find evidence that I’m a man-hater, you won’t because I’m not. There are plenty of great posts around here, so just read them and relax.

FoxNews’ national exit poll found that liberals made up 25% of the electorate, moderates approximately 40%, and conservatives 35%. Self-identified conservatives outnumbered liberals in the presidential vote by just ten points, which is a far cry from a two-to-one advantage. That’s consistent with what other organizations found. Will’s 2-to-1 figure can be found in other surveys of ideological self-identification, and it’s true that a person’s self-identification is not always a reliable indicator how he votes or what policies he favors.

This is completely true. My father identifies as Conservative and is the most proud, staunch Conservative you can find anywhere. At the same time, he was on the phone with me five times a day during the weeks before the election, nervous about every tiny shift of the polls away from Obama. I was even worried for his health in case Obama didn’t win.

The reason for this is that my father is an old-school Conservative of the kind we don’t see on Fox News. A deeply religious person, he hates it when people try to mix religion and politics. Religion for him is a profoundly intimate set of beliefs that should never be aired in public or forced on others. He also resents the attempts by the government to intrude into people’s bodies and personal lives, so the anti-choice and anti-gay rhetoric of the US Republicans is an instant deal-breaker for him.

As an old-school Conservative, my father is a strong believer in law and order. Maintaining law and order is the crucial role of government in a well-functioning society, he believes, which is why the dismissive comments about “that rape thing” and “legitimate rape” put him off the Republicans faster than lightning. “If they don’t recognize rape as a horrible crime and are willing to make excuses for it, they are no Conservatives,” he says. And, of course, when he heard that his God’s name was taken in vain to justify rape (remember the rape as “a gift from God” comments?), he was livid.

The tragedy of today’s Conservatives is that they don’t have legitimate representation in the US politics. Their movement has been hijacked by hysterics and idiots. So it makes sense to switch over to the Liberal side, especially since Obama is very far to the right on foreign policy and the economy, anyway.

I’m not made for the life of intrigue, folks. Somebody just made gruel out of me and ate me for supper. I lost the game before I even found out it had begun.

Shit. I’m just too simple-minded. I always blab out everything I think the moment I think it or even before. It never occurs to me that not everybody is the same way and that people might lie and scheme to get their way.

I’m a simpleton and a dupe.

A colleague I don’t know very well just sent me an email that says, “GR8T.” I Googled it and I’m guessing it is supposed to mean “great.” I’m now kind of scared of the colleague in question.

Is it wrong of me to be annoyed with this style of writing? It took me forever to get the students to write emails in a correct professional format, with a formal greeting and signature, and now this?

In case you are wondering, the colleague is at least my age and probably older.

N. and I were celebrating our third wedding anniversary at this really cool new restaurant last night. Of course, we both speak Russian to each other but it’s a different kind of Russian. Since I’m Ukrainian, I speak very emotionally, rapidly and my voice is very inflected. There is also a lot of hand-waving and many different facial expressions. N. is “a real Russian”, so his way of speaking Russian is slower, has flatter intonations, and sounds less emotional. It is also much quieter.

A waiter observed me talk to N. about the elections and finally decided to interfere.

“Is he in trouble?” he asked, pointing at N. and looking at me with reproach.

I had to explain that everything was perfectly fine and I was not scolding N.

It is kind of annoying to think that I come off as a nagging wife to strangers who don’t understand what I say but it’s good to see an instance of male solidarity.