OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
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User ID: 359
Lol, now I see some of the disconnect. To me and people in my bubble, NFP does not mean, "Having sex now, just without hormonal contraceptives."
Ms. Zito is "taking up a natural family planning method." It takes three months of charting before someone who practices NFP is supposed to have sex. Some rules rely on six months to a year of charting data. Knowing this, many practitioners start charting before they even date. I charted well before I was married.
When I see that someone is learning about fertility-awareness, it isn't necessarily connected to sex. It's simply useful information to have about yourself!
To Rightists with daughters reading this: are you concerned that they might encounter "natural family planning" on the internet and really f*** up their life?
No, they are going to learn it as part of the puberty talk and will have a Tempdrop to warn them when their period is about to start.
I think the article describes that Ms. Zito is not a "Normal person" any longer and has gone "crunchy." Crunchy women get into charting for all sorts of health reasons, including mental health awareness, productivity boosting, meal planning and exercising, etc. There are lots of books out there that recommend women do X task on one part of their cycle, eat a specific way on another part, etc.
Are you suggesting that the gap between inheritability and discovered genes is some kind of psychic connection between twins that other siblings do not have? Or are you making a broader point that genes are not actually connected to our personality and other traits and something else determines our personality (which weirdly chooses to give people similar traits based on degrees of consanguinity?)
You have no idea the quality of Fanfiction I will willingly read.
Breaking news: Trump is saying he will not be deporting illegal immigrants who work on Farms and in Hotels.
Gavin Newsom is claiming it for a win for the violent riots that have taken over LA and other major cities.
This is a bit of a let down for Trump Supporters and anyone who wants to take America back from those who were not invited. Especially with Gavin Newsom rubbing it in the public's face. Especially with American Approval of deportation efforts have been increasing.
Trump's rationale appears to be:
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Hotels/farms are low hanging fruit, it's easy to pick up illegal immigrants from these locations.
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After swooping these groups first, then the only applicants to these positions (at the wages the farms and hotels are willing to pay) are the criminal illegal immigrants.
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So focus on criminality first.
Does this mean that, once every last criminal is deported, he will then do sweeps of farms and hotels? Left ambiguous.
One problem is the effect of exploitable labor goes in one way. Over the past 2 decades, Landscaping businesses that employed high school students and ex cons went out of business because they couldn't compete against undocumented workers.
If one farm gets raided, and one farm growing similar things does not get raided for another year, then the first farm needs to hire more expensive people and raise prices while the second farm will still benefit from the lowered wages. The farm that got raided first goes out of business first, the second farm maybe gets to buy up the first farm, then when they are inevitably raided they still stay in business and make more money now.
It's not fair. It's not fair that the government has not enforced its own rules surrounding hiring employees uniformly across industries.
The fair thing would be to deport 100% of everyone deportable all at once. The shock of that will be destructive to every industry that is predominately illegal immigrants.
The next fair thing might be to deport 10% of employees in every business all together, then another 10% later, and so on until the bottom is reached.
Of course, the above two "fair" plans are ridiculous. We do not have the man-power to do it.
Any other fair ideas? Besides Trump's new plan of "Don't try to tackle this right now."
But then there's no more American people. Who will our elected leaders serve? "The people currently standing on the territory formally known as the USA?" Whose long-term interests do they protect?
Our leaders should have a referent "American people" and put the interests of these "American people" first. I assure you that leaders of other countries understand who "their people" are and serve their interests to the detriment of our own. If we do not have leaders who look out for our interest, then we will taken advantage of at every turn.
Who are the American people? Citizens, their children, and those they adopt in. Adoption isn't an uncaring, unnoticed act. It's always personal and usually planned for. The adoptee needs to want to join the family and take on the family's customs.
I kind of assumed that your flair meant that you were taking the role of MSNBC if it was a person and was posting. Like how we talk about "alts" as alternative accounts that a single person has.
For my background - I am the mother of four kids, the oldest of which is a handful and the third of which has some kind of birth defect that currently requires a fake eye and may require a kidney transplant when he's a teen.
When I say the oldest is a handful, I mean that she is seven years old and has been suspended from school twice for running away from school and across a busy street without looking. Let's call her A. I have trouble taking her places - either I take her by herself somewhere or I leave her behind and take the 6, 3, and 2 year old. It is much easier to take the 6, 3, and 2 year old places together than it is to take A by herself. She is a wonderful child 90% of the time, but 10% of the time she gets stuck on a Bad Idea. Literally stuck, she repeats a phrase over and over again, does not listen to anything, only snaps out of it after 20 or so minutes.
A babysitter quit because one of her "stuck ideas" was to get revenge on the sitter for some slight (didn't get the right color dinner plate, if I remember correctly.) Another stuck idea was to get to the check out line first in a busy Home Depot garden center - I had a toddler in a stroller, a 3 year old walking as fast as he could, and couldn't keep up with the lithe unencumbered A. I lost sight of her and wandered around Home Depot until the intercom said she was at the front - she tried to run into the parking lot by herself but an employee stopped her.
She officially has ADHD and I am supposed to take A to a therapist to treat her for this. They don't think she has ODD because she always feels remorse after. I think she might have high-functioning autism because she also has a very black/white way of looking at things. If someone doesn't predict the future she calls it a lie. Ex. "Can we go outside this afternoon?" "Yes, if the weather stays nice." then if it rains and we have to stay inside, "You lied!"
However, when I filled out the PIC-2 questionnaire with full candor and honesty, the Neuropsych wrote in her parent-facing notes: "[OracleOutlook] responded to the measure in such a way that she reported a slightly higher number of symptoms than is typical for A’s age. This is likely due to increased stressors in their life and not true feigning of symptoms; however, results were interpreted with caution." I suspect we are years away from getting a full diagnosis for whatever is going on with A.
I don't write all this to complain or ask for advice. I am trying to get across the experience of having a "bad kid." I don't take the other kids to as many places as I would like. I worry that they are picking up bad adaptations to having a turbulent, violent personality living with them. The next oldest has a fawn response. The younger two like to hit back. It's not great.
I also have a lot of medical costs from the third child with the eye prosthetic. When he was an infant he needed a new conformer every month or so, which is pretty pricey.
This isn't even getting into pregnancy, which is a crap shoot as you noted.
Ultimately life is a risk. The question is, is it worth it? I say yes. Humans throughout history said "yes" through worse difficulties and dangers.
There are many good reasons to be done having kids. Mine is that I want to increase the odds that my husband is alive and well up to the point the youngest turns 18.
One consideration is that having one difficult kid is hard, but I actually think it gets easier when you have more kids who are better behaved. I'm glad I didn't stop at A. If I had, I would assume there was something wrong with my parenting that caused her emotional disturbances. I also get to have "normal kid experiences" with the other kids.
If your complicated kid is the youngest, it's probably easier to manage. I've seen families where they keep going until they have 5-7 kids, hit a kid who needs more attention, and then stop. They seem pretty happy, even when they need to have specialized schooling, medical procedures, etc. It seems easier for an experienced parent to manage, and they also have older kids in middle school/high school who can help out more with chores and babysitting.
While having a really needy or psychotic child can be really bad, the odds of it happening without a clear family history are around the same as getting into a really bad car accident. Going into each pregnancy I worried about it around as much as I worry about getting paralyzed on a road trip, which is to say not overly much - certainly not enough to make me reconsider.
I hope this helps give you more to consider. I'm not trying to persuade you to have another kid, just give a different perspective on the "getting unlucky" phenomenon. I love A. I wish she didn't get "stuck" most days, but I'm glad she's here. I'll do whatever it takes to raise her right.
Also, life is sadder without a 1 year old in the house. It just is. I have a long ways to go before I get a grandkid to play with but I look forward to it already.
In a normal, healthy, average relationship, a single man and a single woman partner together to provide each other with resources that would be difficult for the other to get. They do this because they have a shared vision of the future, a shared project to raise the next generation.
The historical norm was for a woman to be spinning cotton, wool, or flax from sunup to sundown to make enough thread to weave enough cloth to sew into enough garments for herself, her husband, and her children. There was a gendered world - every civilization had their own norms, but they all had norms surrounding what tasks belong to women (tasks that can be done by weaker people with the tendency to get pregnant and have babies/toddlers hanging off them.) For example, in a European village a man paid taxes by giving his lord crops, while women owed their taxes in eggs.
Men needed women's labor. Women needed men's labor.
There was a weird period in the 19th-20th century where machines took over a lot of the labor that women could do, while there was much less automation of male labor. Then in the later 20th century, the women's labor that wasn't automatable went overseas to cheaper labor. This lead to more "Homemakers" outside the upper class.
But now, the majority of the time, both men and women work outside the home. Both men and women need to labor productively to keep themselves in comfort. We are reverting back to the historical norm (except for the "women taking jobs they can do while minding their own children" part. We'd probably need to repeal the CRA and some license regulations before we could get there.)
Until very recently, the Democratic Party in Minnesota had Pro-life Democrats.
Minnesota’s Iron Range was both very pro-life and very pro-union. They elected pro-life Democrat Jim Oberstar to Congress many times, until Obamacare turned the pro-lifers against him.
Except all across the board, in this scenario, the country removes the downward pressure to wages caused by the underclass who can get paid under the table, who cannot ask for help if they are abused, and who are desperate to accept any wage to avoid going back home. That changes the wage equilibrium everywhere.
If farm wages double (not quadruple, like in the example above - I think that the quadrupling was a hyperbole) and farm workers make $40 an hour, price of groceries increases $150/year per family of four. Let's say $50/year for a single person.
Then anyone else in a shitty job can say, "is this really any better than making 40/hr picking corn?" And so now Amazon has to raise wages, or provide better working environments, to at least be better than farm work. And so it goes, rippling through the economy. Wages for the bottom third of the country should rise more than 150/yr.
What I don't understand is why you not only think that ownership is bad but that everyone would agree with you that ownership is bad. The phrase, "legal right to deprive others," might sound scary simply because you put the word "legal" there, but it's incomplete. For example, my kids own things, even if legally I have every right to confiscate their toys. There are some toys which are gifted on birthdays which are theirs for a time, but eventually go into the general toy pile. There are some toys which we would never ever make them share - like the special stuffed animals they have slept with at night since they were infants.
These stuffed animals might be legally "mine," but they are in fact my children's. They have the right to deprive their siblings of these toys, and that is 100% perfect, treasured, lovely. I don't know how to express just how wonderful it is for them to have ownership of these toys, and how much psychological benefit this ownership has generated.
These stuffies are theirs. They smell like their owner. Putting their stuffy in their hands makes them calm down within a minute. Night wakeups are easily managed by reminding my kids of the existence of their stuffed animal.
One day, while driving my oldest to school, she started getting upset. I asked her what was wrong.
She said, "I left Hopper on the floor."
"It's ok, he'll be just fine there."
"No, what if [the toddler] steps on him?"
"Hopper will be just fine, I've stepped on him before and I weigh much more than [toddler]. Hopper will bounce back! He's fluffy."
"No.. What if [the toddler] steps on him... and realizes how soft and wonderful he is?"
"Oh, you're worried about Forbidden Love. I'll call daddy and have him put Hopper on the dresser."
This sounds cute, but it expands further than children in a family. An ideal family holds everything in common, it's as love-oriented over ownership-oriented as you can get. Even in the family, there are different divisions of dominion. Humans need dominion.
We naturally divide up labor and tools according to who has the capacity to use them. Oftentimes divisions become domains - the husband does yard work and bathroom cleaning, the wife does kitchen work, the kids bring the mail in and sweep on weekends. Having dominion gives you authority to do things you otherwise wouldn't do. When a kid is told to clean the counters, the kid will wipe just the visible areas without moving the toaster or spice rack out of the way. This is because the kid does not have dominion over the whole kitchen, doesn't feel pieces of his own awareness/soul/psyche over all the appliances. The adult who has dominion over the kitchen will take everything down, move tables and chairs and appliances, and give everything the maintenance it needs to be clean and functional.
People find dignity in owning things and using them to make other things. My knitting supplies and the kitchen's baking tools, these are mine. I take care of them, I use them to make things for my family. I don't need a lawyer to step in, everyone in the family knows that these are mine and they need to ask my permission to use them. In using these tools I create my identity and dignity.
And if that applies so well in the home, where all is held in legal common and we are constantly working towards the other's good, how much more does that apply in the public world?
I think the only sympathetic thing I find in your comments are what Catholics would call, "The Universal Destination of Goods." Catholics have a concept that the whole world is a gift to all humans from God, and that no one has the right to deprive others of what they need. So that whoever has two shirts should give one to someone without any. And if you have more bread stored up than you can ever eat, you are stealing it from someone without.
However, this concept is tempered by the idea that humans get dignity from work, humans were made to be stewards, and good stewardship depends on having a sense of ownership over the physical world. So you have a world that is truly owned by God, gifted to humanity as a whole, which is divided to everyone as stewards. These stewards have a sense of ownership which is in reality participation in the Divine Ownership of all things. Not everyone has an equal share of stewardship, because there is inequality in people's capacities along with inefficiencies in the allocation methods. But everyone should be using their goods to the glory of God and the well-being of every person.
There you go, I have articulated a positive vision of property and ownership. Now your turn. I'm as tired of everyone else on this forum of how you keep dancing around what you actually believe should happen, rather than just acting negative about a concept that most people actually see the benefits of.
Sure, I can conceive that someone could be incorrect. But my point is, what do you mean by "American" here?
down on the farm, labor costs are typically less than 20% or for specialty crops close to 40% of total operating costs, and the price from the farm is about one-third the price on the shelf...
Quadrupling those wages might cost the typical family $300 in a year.
From Oren Cass' "Jobs Americans Would Do" https://americancompass.org/jobs-americans-would-do/
US has started removing non-essential people from the Middle East. People assume that this means an attack by Iran is imminent. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-embassy-iraq-preparing-ordered-evacuation-due-heightened-security-risks-2025-06-11/
The expected series of events would be:
- Iran is very insistent on making nuclear weapons.
- US and Israel cannot allow this
- Israel attacks Iran
- Iran attacks Israel and US bases in the region directly.
If the report is the same one I saw, it seems so odd to me.
Why does he have roommates when he also has a family with five children and a wife he's still married to? Why did he text his roommates that he "did something stupid" instead of his wife? Unless they're estranged.
VP Vance mentioned something about "hitting a target the size of a washing machine." They either pulled off something incredibly slick that no one but the US could do... or they tried and can't tell for sure if it worked or not.
Are you saying inflation was caused by wages increasing instead of the government printing money?
Real wages went down in the Biden years.
What I recall during the Biden years was employers complaining that they couldn't find people to work for them, without being willing to raise their wages. And then Biden imported millions of new low-wage workers for the complaining businesses instead of letting the market come to a new equilibrium.
Florida requires E-verify now: https://www.paychex.com/articles/compliance/florida-e-verify-requirements-for-private-employers
And so far it hasn't tanked their economy. In 2023 and 2024 Florida lead the nation in GDP growth with 9.2%. The number of construction jobs actually increased.
This was the reasoning behind vaccine passports. If you were vaccinated, then you wouldn't be passing on the virus. I lived in a place that required vaccine passports to go entertainment venues. Grocery stores technically didn't require a vaccine passport but if you wanted to take your mask off you needed to show proof of vaccination first. The rationale behind these things is that the vaccinated can't (or are significantly less likely) to be infected and infect others.
These were public policies made by public health professionals. The public health professionals thought the vaccines reduced infection rates and that's why they set the policy the way they did.
Sounds like a Christian should have reached out to her and told her that she is loved - explained forgiveness, sanctification, and water that does not leave you thirsty. Instead, she got a mob calling her names.
The humanitarian concern that I need to address first is that our own lower class is dying deaths of despair, keeping unemployment down but also decreasing the life expectancy. I wasn't listing out things I want you to be concerned with, when I was talking about how exploitable the labor is. I was listing out several reasons why that labor is distortionary.
We have NEVER had over 16% of the US population foriegn-born since we became a country, and every time we approached this number we put hard breaks on to reduce immigration, usually to the benefit of the economy and rising labor standards.
Leaving the spigot on will quickly dilute American civic values. If it is so easy for someone from another country to maintain American values without being surrounded by native-born Americans, then why do they not just turn their countries into America? If they are already American's at heart, why does the world not have the same Bill of Rights, expectations surrounding civil duties, trust, and friendliness?
Instead, we have programs in place to inculcate legal immigrants on the path to citizenship into our civic values and ensure their loyalty to our nation over their former ones. Illegal immigrants and people here on temporary Visas don't have that.
The inculcation is made much easier when 90% of your neighbors, co-workers, shop keepers, etc are also already part of the American culture. If only 50% of the people surrounding a new immigrant are from their previous country, then obviously they will be very slow to adopt American norms, if they ever do. Look at the Enshittification of California for an example.
Regarding Cardinal Tagle, all I can say is that failure to generate a thriving local church doesn't mean a lack of Cardinal allies. @hydroacetylene knows more about the politics side of the equation.
The Spirit of Vatican II is characterized by the time immediately preceding and immediately following the Second Vatican Council. I'm not sure what would have gone differently if this "Spirit" wasn't a real spirit, and a demon to boot. Watch the Puppet Mass or the Clown Mass and tell me there's no demonic involvement. (I'm not sure how serious I am being here. There are many who would take this allegation more seriously.)
Rewind a bit. Why did people feel like they could have a mass with clowns and puppets? Before Vatican II, there was a very specific rubric they were supposed to follow. After Vatican II, there was a very specific rubric they were supposed to follow, one that did not recommend clowns or puppets. The rubric changed, but the adherence to it stopped. Priests either started doing their own inventions, or stepped back from their leadership role in the liturgy and allowed lay people (predominantly women who were teenagers in the 1960s) to add things to the liturgy.
The Spirit of Vatican II, most plainly put, is the attitude many took when things that seemed unchangable began to change. Many Catholics didn't (and still don't) understand the difference between small "t" traditional practices, like liturgical rites, and big "T" Traditional Doctrine, like teachings on Christology, Sacraments, and Morality. If you were alive then, and thought the mass is something the Church taught could never change, and then the Church changed it...
The conclusion a lot of people made was that anything could be changed. And if anything could be changed, it might as well be changed by themselves, in their own image and likeness.
Let's rewind a bit further. Why were people dissatisfied with the Mass of Pius V? The laity felt disconnected from the mass. There were lots of abuses. The most common mass was a low mass, without music and most of the fanfare that fans of the Mass of Pius V like today.
It was common for priests to try to rush through the mass - I have heard people say that most masses they went to were 20 minutes long. In order to get through the whole liturgy in 20 minutes, the Priest would have to be mumbling quickly in Latin. There wasn't as much call-and-response like there is in the new mass. The experience of many Catholics was: go to Church, pray quietly while listening to a priest mutter to himself for 20 minutes, sometimes receive communion, and walk out.
High masses were glorious time commitments, low masses were checking off a cosmic checklist. Good and holy priests would have good and holy low masses. But there were many priests who did not fill this category, and many priests who felt like there was no point in enunciating a mass spoken in Latin to God instead of in the vernacular to the Congregation.
What was the new mass, the Mass of Paul VI, supposed to look like? Done according to the rubrics, it looks like this. According to the Vatican II document discussing the Liturgy, Sacrosantum Concilium, Latin was still supposed to be given "Pride of Place." Here is how the actual council of Vatican II wanted things to develop:
- Therefore no other person, even if he be a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority.
- Sacred scripture is of the greatest importance in the celebration of the liturgy. For it is from scripture that lessons are read and explained in the homily, and psalms are sung; the prayers, collects, and liturgical songs are scriptural in their inspiration and their force, and it is from the scriptures that actions and signs derive their meaning.
- It is to be stressed that whenever rites, according to their specific nature, make provision for communal celebration involving the presence and active participation of the faithful, this way of celebrating them is to be preferred, so far as possible, to a celebration that is individual and quasi-private.
-The sermon, moreover, should draw its content mainly from scriptural and liturgical sources, and its character should be that of a proclamation of God's wonderful works in the history of salvation
- the use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites... But since the use of the mother tongue, whether in the Mass, the administration of the sacraments, or other parts of the liturgy, frequently may be of great advantage to the people, the limits of its employment may be extended. This will apply in the first place to the readings and directives, and to some of the prayers and chants, according to the regulations on this matter to be laid down separately in subsequent chapters.
-The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services. But other kinds of sacred music, especially polyphony, are by no means excluded from liturgical celebrations, so long as they accord with the spirit of the liturgical action
At no point do I see anything recommending deploying clowns.
And so it goes for the other Vatican II documents. Individual Catholics took minor developments in a certain direction (often a return to traditions and increased emphasis on teachings from earlier in Church History) and decided to make a complete rupture.
I focused a lot on the Liturgical side to this, but I could make similar write ups on what Vatican II teaches on interpretation of scripture, No Salvation Outside the Church, etc.
I have never had any trouble finding good parishes that mostly abide by the rubrics. Even so, I have noticed an increase in chant and Latin. Parishes have started doing the entrance antiphon - I never heard this as a kid. Our parish has two first-year priests, they seem a lot less gay and more knowledgeable than the older priests. There is a major vibe shift going on.
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Primarily, I would be teaching my daughters their bodies and give them tools/trackers just for the educational value. There is so much more value to being aware of your cycle. It can tell a woman when she will be the most motivated, when she'll be more likely to make bad decisions, etc. Teenagers taught to monitor their bodies have reported things like, "Now I know when I'm angry at a certain time of the month, to just wait it out and not make any big decisions." Teenage girls in correctional facilities were astonished to see that their misbehavior typically fell in the same time of the month. Etc. I don't think I need to defend to this sub the value of self-knowledge.
The ideal would be that they don't have sex. But if they do, they will know exactly when and why they got pregnant.
I have a huge issue with lumping together "Symptoms-based fertility awareness ex. symptothermal and calendar-based methods". There are five different methods I can name off the top of my head that meet that criteria, which vary in effectiveness from 75% to 99.8% with perfect use. Complicating this is that a lot of people use a condom during fertile time instead of abstaining, which just makes the effectiveness on par with a condom.
Calendar-based method: Terrible effectiveness rate. I've heard of one that was just, "Have sex every 10 days" and it had an effectiveness rate of like 90%, which is funny but isn't super in-tune with the body.
Then there's the Marquette Method, which is starting to get into more measurable, technological solutions. You pee on a stick every morning, it gives you a reading you chart, the chart tells you whether or not you should have sex that day if you want to be pregnant or not.
Typical use effectiveness of 93.3% is not bad at all - very comparable to the pill.
The version I use and will teach my daughters is the Sympto-Thermal method with a Doeringer rule - like the Sensiplan. I would give them special thermometers to wear at night which only need to be synced about once a week (unless you really want sex, in which case they get synced every morning.) For the Sensiplan Method:
This is comparable to an IUD.
Trust me, I have done the research on this. It is literally impossible to get pregnant on phase III (three days after ovulation to the start of menses), if your phase I is longer than 6 days. I've had to rely on this knowledge many a time and it doesn't fail. If I have sex anywhere near a fertile window, I get pregnant immediately (I have learned.)
Edit to add an article on the "teach teenagers to be aware of their cycle" thing: https://naturalwomanhood.org/cycle-mindfulness-what-happens-when-you-teach-fertility-awareness-to-teen-girls/
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