OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
No bio...
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!
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.
There were forty-two unintended pregnancies which provided a typical use unintended pregnancy rate of 6.7 per 100 women over twelve months of use. Eleven of the forty-two unintended pregnancies were associated with correct use of the method. The total unintended pregnancy rate over twelve months of use was 2.8 per 100 for women with regular cycles, 8.0 per 100 women for the postpartum and breastfeeding women, and 4.3 per 100 for women with irregular menstrual cycles.
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:
After 13 cycles, 1.8 per 100 women of the cohort experienced an unintended pregnancy; 9.2 per 100 women dropped out because of dissatisfaction with the method; the pregnancy rate was 0.6 per 100 women and per 13 cycles when there was no unprotected intercourse in the fertile time.
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/
Here is what she found out: for 90% of the girls in the program who had ended up in jail, it happened during the premenstrual phase of her cycle...
One of the documented outcomes of Teen STAR’s work is the much lower likelihood for these girls to engage in premature sexual activities. The program was evaluated by ChildTrends, a leading U.S. nonprofit research organization, which reported “that this program is effective in reducing the rate of pregnancy, delaying the onset of sexual activity, decreasing sexual activity in sexually-active youth, and improving attitudes towards abstinence, compared with students in the no-treatment groups.”
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
3d ago
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.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4d ago
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?)
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.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10d ago
You have no idea the quality of Fanfiction I will willingly read.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10d ago
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.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
15d ago
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.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
15d ago
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.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
16d ago
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.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
16d ago
You are correct.
However, we still ought to show her love. Because "this is not working" doesn't immediately lead to "this is what I should be doing instead." I think she is at the point of "This is not working." Now would be a good time to show her the unconditional fierce love that Christians in her life have so far failed to provide.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
16d ago
It was average wage taken from several months in a year span. But you are right, your article is better.
Where did all the money go? What did Pete Butigeg spend his 7.5 billion that was earmarked for charging stations across America in the Infrastructure and Jobs Act?
Probably a lot went to the pockets of Beltway grifters. It certainly didn't go into the pockets of actual construction workers.
Then there was the child tax credits, the stimulus checks, etc. Money went to everyone across the class spectrum.
Reading your article, it looks like the increase in wages was caused primarily by Minimum Wage laws increasing wages by fiat. I do not suggest doing that. Creating artificial floors is not great for a market. Even so, your article sounds pretty happy about increasing lower decile wages? Why is that? If you are correct, then should not it be obvious to an economically savvy publication to be terrified of the resulting inflation?
Or is inflation a little more complicated than that?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
16d ago
That would lower GDP, while reducing immigrant labor to increase productivity and GDP. Possibly because there is an increase to automation when cheap laborers are less available.
Machines are different from cheap laborers in that they do not compete for housing, food, etc. Demand decreases if you swap out a machine for a human. Where does price equalize if demand decreases and supply stays the same?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
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.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
Even if we gave everyone citizenship, there would still be downward pressure from wages. The majority of immigrants are in low-skilled jobs. If we maintained immigration so that the same proportion of upper-, middle-, and lower-class people immigrated as US citizens, then there would not be distortion. Even with removing illegality from the equation, immigration creates a distortion to the labor market exerting downward pressure.
This is in addition to the cultural concerns of having 16% of people in America "foreign born" and the increased difficulty of passing along US values to immigrants as the proportion of native-born Americans goes down. Does American culture matter? Yes! It created the prosperity and freedom that Americans enjoy - the very reason why the world wants to come here. Don't kill the Golden Goose. Don't tear down Chesterton's fence.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
It doesn't help to just continue abuse because, "well, she's already been abused before so now it's on her to repent." Which is what it comes across as when all I said is that Christians should love her instead of verbally abuse her and people are objecting to that.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
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.
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.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
I didn't say that anywhere. I'm saying, love comes first, then repentance. Repentance is necessary. But it doesn't happen first.
Les Miserables is on the mind, consider Jean Valjean and his moment of repentance. After a life of getting kicked around, he steals the Bishop's valuables. And in response, the Bishop loves him, saves him from going to Prison again, gives him more than he stole. And that is the moment that Jean Valjean actually feels sorry for his actions. Once he experiences true love.
You can say, that's just a story. But there is a reason why it rings true. The world is full of bitter people who will stay bitter forever unless someone breaks their shell with love.
Will it always work? No. But does it work? In my experience, yes.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
What year was this?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
Sure, I can conceive that someone could be incorrect. But my point is, what do you mean by "American" here?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
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.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
17d ago
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/
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
18d ago
Lately I've been thinking of the argument made in this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=F9xYqQDTHnk
God's love remains, even when we are at our worst. Basically, Christianity is a relationship with Jesus. Jesus looks at us, loves us, first. Being loved comes first, then repentance is the response to that.
Repentance is important, but it's not first. First is being loved by Jesus and us, His body on Earth.
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.
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