What on earth are you talking about?
Do you believe the government dictates your vows? What "rules"? You just cannot grasp the concept of no fault divorce or prenuptial, can you?

I guess you never planned on kids or shared assets. If you do, not having a marriage means you almost certainly will pay for them for 18+ years but won't have many rights to be in their lives, and may lose your rights to any assets if she grabs first. Uncle Sam is in your relationship, married or not....without a marriage contract, he makes ALL the rules and you have no say.

My brother paid well over a hundred thousand dollars for his divorce in Texas that in my state would have cost under $10K and you congratulate him? You are one strange person.

Again, your perception, not based in fact since the 60's. You assume women take off time to raise the kids and take care of parents and assume fathers don't take paternity leave or have obligations outside work. How 50's. You start from a false position that men work both harder and better, but you have no data to back that up. It certainly hasn't been my experience, I've seen women in the workplace working harder and longer for less pay, sacrificing just like their male counterparts if not more, putting off having families until it's too late while men can have kids long after normal retirement age, putting themselves in dangerous situations where those with power over them have opportunities to abuse that power and abuse those women in ways that rarely happen to men. These aren't exceptions, they're the norm.

Um...so since you admit many women outearn men and the trend reinforces that, meaning soon women in most catagories will out earn men and have more to lose, you admit you're wrong in your position now, right? Of course not, I expect you will still start from a point that hasn't been correct since the era and sexual revolution, early 70's at latest.

No, many of the studies I've seen compared people in the same exact positions in the same industries, even same companies, and women consistently get paid less for the exact same job and hours, and women rarely work less today, and just as often out work their male counterparts knowing they are often token hires not valued by the bosses so have less job security. If I recall correctly, 80% of job losses due to Covid were women, and the men are getting rehired faster. I think you are thinking of some studies from the 80's that made those assumptions and accusations. Comparing apples to apples, women still get shortchanged and as often as not overworked.

Bullshit. You said you would immediately dismiss any woman who has...
"Long dating history? Too much risk
Tends to have short relationships? Too much risk
Likes attention? Too much risk
Single mother (non-widow)? Too much risk
Any mental issues (depression, bipolar, narcissist, anxiety, etc)? Too much risk
Older (why you still single...)? Too much risk
Likes to party? Too much risk
Drinks? Too much risk"

And again, prenuptial. Do you not know what they are? Specify what you expect and agree, and you walk with exactly what you agreed to, no government rules or split involved. Geez. You speak as if you had never heard of them.

Most divorces may be initiated by the woman (if that's true, I expect it's just another assumption) because their husbands are more likely to break their vows first, but are not willing to pay to end the marriage, including penalties for breaking the marriage contract, and we're too dumb to get a prenuptial (or got one that spells out harsh penalties for cheating). Yes, I am assuming men cheat on their spouses more often than the reverse, because men are wired that way.

You are not more likely than not to face a divorce, because it's unlikely any woman meeting your criteria would give you a second thought, and you need to get married to get divorced.

I bet if you show your significant other this thread your 20 year relationship will be in big trouble, or at best enter a long dry dark spell. Women don't like men that believe wholeheartedly that all women are just lessers, leeches that take more than they deserve or even could give back and destroy you whenever they think it serves them. It's probably a good thing you aren't married.

Laws and family court aren't as you describe. Maybe when you enter the 21st century you'll recognize that. The rules of your marriage can be whatever you agree to, including the specifics of the split if it ends.

It's a sad thing you can't grasp that a codified, delineated, agreed to partnership is almost always better, more fulfilling, and has many benefits cohabitation lacks.....almost always unless one or both of you are total douchebags.

*promote (got me by 5 min)

When a man doesn’t love a woman very very much
He signs away his paternal rights and jizzes in a cup
Then with lots of money and scientific genius
Hormones, pain and of course, um… Jesus

The process begins the way god intended
With a transvaginal ultrasound
With a wand longer than a ukulele
When it comes out of my body, it makes this sound (pop)

I give myself daily intradermal injections
An acute blood thinner and estrogen concurrence
Cryopreservation through hormonal activation
And none of it’s covered by insurance

Then I’m knocked out and you’re removed
And combined with a stranger’s come
And as the saying goes
You win some, you lose some/you dispose of the defective ones in a hazardous waste bin

And then you’re frozen until I’m certain
It’s time to unthaw you into a person
Then you’ll expire or you’ll make the grade
And that, my darling, that’s how babies are made
(It’s so easy and natural)

CHORUS:
Hush little egg baby don’t say a word
Mama’s gonna freeze you til she gets rich

And when that day finally arrives
You’ll be constructed in a petri dish
With sperm donor 8w6-3
The silent partner of our family

So hush little egg baby don’t be sad
Just because I never fucked your dad

VERSE 2:
I know there are orphans everywhere
But I’m going to pretend that isn’t real
Don’t look at me like that just cause I admit it
You had kids and you knew the deal

Yeah I feel guilty about overpopulation
And ruining the environment for forever
But Osama Bin Laden had 20 kids
So fuck you or whatever

Sadly procreation is not a meritocracy
And we need to prevent a real life Idiocracy
Though it may be the ultimate form of narcissism
It’s also a way to re-reverse reverse Darwinism

Gonna mute the sound of that ticking clock
I just need the sperm now I don’t need the cock
My ovaries are like hey girl I’m over here
And I’m all like shhhh

I want all the stuff I don’t need a bucket list
It doesn’t make me greedy it just makes me feminist
Now I’m thinking back through all the guys I’ve dated
If they heard this song they’d fucking hate it

CHORUS:
Hush little egg baby don’t you cry
You’ll have the best genes mommy can buy

I don’t want to wait until I get in dire straights
My friends say if I want kids I should go out on some dates
But these working bitches don’t have time to leave it to the fates
The world deserves more Riki’s and the world deserves more Kate’s

So hush little egg baby dad’s are overrated
He did what mattered when he masturbated

BRIDGE:
Hush little egg baby just hold firm
Mama’s gonna buy you designer sperm

And if that sperm gives you random traits
Mama’s gonna test your dna

And if your dna doesn’t make things clear
Mama’s gonna just have to live in fear

And if that fear turns into guilt
Mama’s gonna hold onto what we built

And if I hold too tight as to suffocate
I’ll buy you lots of things to overcompensate

And if that overcompensation’s too transparent
I’ll pretend it’s somehow better with no male parent

And if you say but mom who’s my dad
I’ll say I don’t know and it’s just too bad

And if that badness forms a hole in your heart
I’ll want to make it up to you but won’t know where to start

I’ll probably start by saying it’s just you and me
And there’s no such thing as a normal family

So fuck being normal and let’s do this shit
Momma’s gonna freeze you til she… gets…. rich

I'm 39 the only vaccine I ever got was polio as a child as my grandfather died of polio when my mom was 18.

My mom refused the rest , when I was 4 I went to a measles and chicken pox party and gained immunity that way. Parties like that was huge in late 70s.

But I'm 39, never had mumps, chicken pox, etc anything other than bad back and heart disease which runs in the male side of family, had heat attack at 30, I've made it 9 years so far with stints in chest. But all the men die in late 50s to mid 60s on the paternal side to heart disease.

No vaccine for that


Only vaccine my son has had was polio. He's in a private school

I understand your perspective entirely. My pain for the father made me speak in rage. Individual motivations aside, it makes my stomach turn that one attempt to protect + another's paternal love = death and misery.

I don't believe they had the "right", but that's from a perspective that doesn't really recognize authority in the first place. As long as you do no harm, no one should impede your personal freedom, even if that means risking terribly injury or death on the slimmest chance to save your child.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20pacemaker-t.html?pagewanted=all

One October afternoon three years ago while I was visiting my parents, my mother made a request I dreaded and longed to fulfill. She had just poured me a cup of Earl Grey from her Japanese iron teapot, shaped like a little pumpkin; outside, two cardinals splashed in the birdbath in the weak Connecticut sunlight. Her white hair was gathered at the nape of her neck, and her voice was low. “Please help me get Jeff’s pacemaker turned off,” she said, using my father’s first name. I nodded, and my heart knocked.
Related

Upstairs, my 85-year-old father, Jeffrey, a retired Wesleyan University professor who suffered from dementia, lay napping in what was once their shared bedroom. Sewn into a hump of skin and muscle below his right clavicle was the pacemaker that helped his heart outlive his brain. The size of a pocket watch, it had kept his heart beating rhythmically for nearly five years. Its battery was expected to last five more.

After tea, I knew, my mother would help him from his narrow bed with its mattress encased in waterproof plastic. She would take him to the toilet, change his diaper and lead him tottering to the couch, where he would sit mutely for hours, pretending to read Joyce Carol Oates, the book falling in his lap as he stared out the window.

I don’t like describing what dementia did to my father — and indirectly to my mother — without telling you first that my parents loved each other, and I loved them. That my mother, Valerie, could stain a deck and sew an evening dress from a photo in Vogue and thought of my father as her best friend. That my father had never given up easily on anything.

Born in South Africa, he lost his left arm in World War II, but built floor-to-ceiling bookcases for our living room; earned a Ph.D. from Oxford; coached rugby; and with my two brothers as crew, sailed his beloved Rhodes 19 on Long Island Sound. When I was a child, he woke me, chortling, with his gloss on a verse from “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”: “Awake, my little one! Before life’s liquor in its cup be dry!” At bedtime he tucked me in, quoting “Hamlet” : “May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”

Now I would look at him and think of Anton Chekhov, who died of tuberculosis in 1904. “Whenever there is someone in a family who has long been ill, and hopelessly ill,” he wrote, “there come painful moments when all timidly, secretly, at the bottom of their hearts long for his death.” A century later, my mother and I had come to long for the machine in my father’s chest to fail.

Until 2001, my two brothers and I — all living in California — assumed that our parents would enjoy long, robust old ages capped by some brief, undefined final illness. Thanks to their own healthful habits and a panoply of medical advances — vaccines, antibiotics, airport defibrillators, 911 networks and the like — they weren’t likely to die prematurely of the pneumonias, influenzas and heart attacks that decimated previous generations. They walked every day. My mother practiced yoga. My father was writing a history of his birthplace, a small South African town.

In short, they were seemingly among the lucky ones for whom the American medical system, despite its fragmentation, inequity and waste, works quite well. Medicare and supplemental insurance paid for their specialists and their trusted Middletown internist, the lean, bespectacled Robert Fales, who, like them, was skeptical of medical overdoing. “I bonded with your parents, and you don’t bond with everybody,” he once told me. “It’s easier to understand someone if they just tell it like it is from their heart and their soul.”

They were also stoics and religious agnostics. They signed living wills and durable power-of-attorney documents for health care. My mother, who watched friends die slowly of cancer, had an underlined copy of the Hemlock Society’s “Final Exit” in her bookcase. Even so, I watched them lose control of their lives to a set of perverse financial incentives — for cardiologists, hospitals and especially the manufacturers of advanced medical devices — skewed to promote maximum treatment. At a point hard to precisely define, they stopped being beneficiaries of the war on sudden death and became its victims.

Things took their first unexpected turn on Nov. 13, 2001, when my father — then 79, pacemakerless and seemingly healthy — collapsed on my parents’ kitchen floor in Middletown, making burbling sounds. He had suffered a stroke.

He came home six weeks later permanently incapable of completing a sentence. But as I’ve said, he didn’t give up easily, and he doggedly learned again how to fasten his belt; to peck out sentences on his computer; to walk alone, one foot dragging, to the university pool for water aerobics. He never again put on a shirt without help or looked at the book he had been writing. One day he haltingly told my mother, “I don’t know who I am anymore.”

His stroke devastated two lives. The day before, my mother was an upper-middle-class housewife who practiced calligraphy in her spare time. Afterward, she was one of tens of millions of people in America, most of them women, who help care for an older family member.

Their numbers grow each day. Thanks to advanced medical technologies, elderly people now survive repeated health crises that once killed them, and so the “oldest old” have become the nation’s most rapidly growing age group. Nearly a third of Americans over 85 have dementia (a condition whose prevalence rises in direct relationship to longevity). Half need help with at least one practical, life-sustaining activity, like getting dressed or making breakfast. Even though a capable woman was hired to give my dad showers, my 77-year-old mother found herself on duty more than 80 hours a week. Her blood pressure rose and her weight fell. On a routine visit to Dr. Fales, she burst into tears. She was put on sleeping pills and antidepressants.

My father said he came to believe that she would have been better off if he had died. “She’d have weeped the weep of a widow,” he told me in his garbled, poststroke speech, on a walk we took together in the fall of 2002. “And then she would have been all right.” It was hard to tell which of them was suffering more.

As we shuffled through the fallen leaves that day, I thought of my father’s father, Ernest Butler. He was 79 when he died in 1965, before pacemakers, implanted cardiac defibrillators, stents and replacement heart valves routinely staved off death among the very old. After completing some long-unfinished chairs, he cleaned his woodshop, had a heart attack and died two days later in a plain hospital bed. As I held my dad’s soft, mottled hand, I vainly wished him a similar merciful death.

A few days before Christmas that year, after a vigorous session of water exercises, my father developed a painful inguinal (intestinal) hernia. My mother took him to Fales, who sent them to a local surgeon, who sent them to a cardiologist for a preoperative clearance. After an electrocardiogram recorded my father’s slow heartbeat — a longstanding and symptomless condition not uncommon in the very old — the cardiologist, John Rogan, refused to clear my dad for surgery unless he received a pacemaker.

Without the device, Dr. Rogan told me later, my father could have died from cardiac arrest during surgery or perhaps within a few months. It was the second time Rogan had seen my father. The first time, about a year before, he recommended the device for the same slow heartbeat. That time, my then-competent and prestroke father expressed extreme reluctance, on the advice of Fales, who considered it overtreatment.

My father’s medical conservatism, I have since learned, is not unusual. According to an analysis by the Dartmouth Atlas medical-research group, patients are far more likely than their doctors to reject aggressive treatments when fully informed of pros, cons and alternatives — information, one study suggests, that nearly half of patients say they don’t get. And although many doctors assume that people want to extend their lives, many do not. In a 1997 study in The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 30 percent of seriously ill people surveyed in a hospital said they would “rather die” than live permanently in a nursing home. In a 2008 study in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 28 percent of patients with advanced heart failure said they would trade one day of excellent health for another two years in their current state.

When Rogan suggested the pacemaker for the second time, my father was too stroke-damaged to discuss, and perhaps even to weigh, his trade­offs. The decision fell to my mother — anxious to relieve my father’s pain, exhausted with caregiving, deferential to doctors and no expert on high-tech medicine. She said yes. One of the most important medical decisions of my father’s life was over in minutes. Dr. Fales was notified by fax.

Fales loved my parents, knew their suffering close at hand, continued to oppose a pacemaker and wasn’t alarmed by death. If he had had the chance to sit down with my parents, he could have explained that the pacemaker’s battery would last 10 years and asked whether my father wanted to live to be 89 in his nearly mute and dependent state. He could have discussed the option of using a temporary external pacemaker that, I later learned, could have seen my dad safely through surgery. But my mother never consulted Fales. And the system would have effectively penalized him if she had. Medicare would have paid him a standard office-visit rate of $54 for what would undoubtedly have been a long meeting — and nothing for phone calls to work out a plan with Rogan and the surgeon.

Medicare has made minor improvements since then, and in the House version of the health care reform bill debated last year, much better payments for such conversations were included. But after the provision was distorted as reimbursement for “death panels,” it was dropped. In my father’s case, there was only a brief informed-consent process, covering the boilerplate risks of minor surgery, handled by the general surgeon.

I believe that my father’s doctors did their best within a compartmentalized and time-pressured medical system. But in the absence of any other guiding hand, there is no doubt that economics helped shape the wider context in which doctors made decisions. Had we been at the Mayo Clinic — where doctors are salaried, medical records are electronically organized and care is coordinated by a single doctor — things might have turned out differently. But Middletown is part of the fee-for-service medical economy. Doctors peddle their wares on a piecework basis; communication among them is haphazard; thinking is often short term; nobody makes money when medical interventions are declined; and nobody is in charge except the marketplace.

And so on Jan. 2, 2003, at Middlesex Hospital, the surgeon implanted my father’s pacemaker using local anesthetic. Medicare paid him $461 and the hospital a flat fee of about $12,000, of which an estimated $7,500 went to St. Jude Medical, the maker of the device. The hernia was fixed a few days later.

It was a case study in what primary-care doctors have long bemoaned: that Medicare rewards doctors far better for doing procedures than for assessing whether they should be done at all. The incentives for overtreatment continue, said Dr. Ted Epperly, the board chairman of the American Academy of Family Physicians, because those who profit from them — specialists, hospitals, drug companies and the medical-device manufacturers — spend money lobbying Congress and the public to keep it that way.

Last year, doctors, hospitals, drug companies, medical-equipment manufacturers and other medical professionals spent $545 million on lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. This may help explain why researchers estimate that 20 to 30 percent of Medicare’s $510 billion budget goes for unnecessary tests and treatment. Why cost-containment received short shrift in health care reform. Why physicians like Fales net an average of $173,000 a year, while noninvasive cardiologists like Rogan net about $419,000.

The system rewarded nobody for saying “no” or even “wait” — not even my frugal, intelligent, Consumer-Reports-reading mother. Medicare and supplemental insurance covered almost every penny of my father’s pacemaker. My mother was given more government-mandated consumer information when she bought a new Camry a year later.

And so my father’s electronically managed heart — now requiring frequent monitoring, paid by Medicare — became part of the $24 billion worldwide cardiac-device industry and an indirect subsidizer of the fiscal health of American hospitals. The profit margins that manufacturers earn on cardiac devices is close to 30 percent. Cardiac procedures and diagnostics generate about 20 percent of hospital revenues and 30 percent of profits.

Shortly after New Year’s 2003, my mother belatedly called and told me about the operations, which went off without a hitch. She didn’t call earlier, she said, because she didn’t want to worry me. My heart sank, but I said nothing. It is one thing to silently hope that your beloved father’s heart might fail. It is another to actively abet his death.

The pacemaker bought my parents two years of limbo, two of purgatory and two of hell. At first they soldiered on, with my father no better and no worse. My mother reread Jon Kabat-Zinn’s “Full Catastrophe Living,” bought a self-help book on patience and rose each morning to meditate.

In 2005, the age-related degeneration that had slowed my father’s heart attacked his eyes, lungs, bladder and bowels. Clots as narrow as a single human hair lodged in tiny blood vessels in his brain, killing clusters of neurons by depriving them of oxygen. Long partly deaf, he began losing his sight to wet macular degeneration, requiring ocular injections that cost nearly $2,000 each. A few months later, he forgot his way home from the university pool. He grew incontinent. He was collapsing physically, like an ancient, shored-up house.

In the summer of 2006, he fell in the driveway and suffered a brain hemorrhage. Not long afterward, he spent a full weekend compulsively brushing and rebrushing his teeth. “The Jeff I married . . . is no longer the same person,” my mother wrote in the journal a social worker had suggested she keep. “My life is in ruins. This is horrible, and I have lasted for five years.” His pacemaker kept on ticking.

When bioethicists debate life-extending technologies, the effects on people like my mother rarely enter the calculus. But a 2007 Ohio State University study of the DNA of family caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease showed that the ends of their chromosomes, called telomeres, had degraded enough to reflect a four-to-eight-year shortening of lifespan. By that reckoning, every year that the pacemaker gave my irreparably damaged father took from my then-vigorous mother an equal year.

When my mother was upset, she meditated or cleaned house. When I was upset, I Googled. In 2006, I discovered that pacemakers could be deactivated without surgery. Nurses, doctors and even device salesmen had done so, usually at deathbeds. A white ceramic device, like a TV remote and shaped like the wands that children use to blow bubbles, could be placed around the hump on my father’s chest. Press a few buttons and the electrical pulses that ran down the leads to his heart would slow until they were no longer effective. My father’s heart, I learned, would probably not stop. It would just return to its old, slow rhythm. If he was lucky, he might suffer cardiac arrest and die within weeks, perhaps in his sleep. If he was unlucky, he might linger painfully for months while his lagging heart failed to suffuse his vital organs with sufficient oxygenated blood.

If we did nothing, his pacemaker would not stop for years. Like the tireless charmed brooms in Disney’s “Fantasia,” it would prompt my father’s heart to beat after he became too demented to speak, sit up or eat. It would keep his heart pulsing after he drew his last breath. If he was buried, it would send signals to his dead heart in the coffin. If he was cremated, it would have to be cut from his chest first, to prevent it from exploding and damaging the walls or hurting an attendant.

On the Internet, I discovered that the pacemaker — somewhat like the ventilator, defibrillator and feeding tube — was first an exotic, stopgap device, used to carry a handful of patients through a brief medical crisis. Then it morphed into a battery-powered, implantable and routine treatment. When Medicare approved the pacemaker for reimbursement in 1966, the market exploded. Today pacemakers are implanted annually in more than 400,000 Americans, about 80 percent of whom are over 65. According to calculations by the Dartmouth Atlas research group using Medicare data, nearly a fifth of new recipients who receive pacemakers annually — 76,000 — are over 80. The typical patient with a cardiac device today is an elderly person suffering from at least one other severe chronic illness.

Over the years, as technology has improved, the battery life of these devices lengthened. The list of heart conditions for which they are recommended has grown. In 1984, the treatment guidelines from the American College of Cardiology declared that pacemakers were strongly recommended as “indicated” or mildly approved as “reasonable” for 56 heart conditions and “not indicated” for 31 more. By 2008, the list for which they were strongly or mildly recommended expanded to 88, with most of the increase in the lukewarm “reasonable” category.

The research backing the expansion of diagnoses was weak. Over all, only 5 percent of the positive recommendations were supported by research from multiple double-blind randomized studies, the gold standard of evidence-based medicine. And 58 percent were based on no studies at all, only a “consensus of expert opinion.” Of the 17 cardiologists who wrote the 2008 guidelines, 11 received financing from cardiac-device makers or worked at institutions receiving it. Seven, due to the extent of their financial connections, were recused from voting on the guidelines they helped write.

This pattern — a paucity of scientific support and a plethora of industry connections — holds across almost all cardiac treatments, according to the cardiologist Pierluigi Tricoci of Duke University’s Clinical Research Institute. Last year in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Tricoci and his co-authors wrote that only 11 percent of 2,700 widely used cardiac-treatment guidelines were based on that gold standard. Most were based only on expert opinion.

Experts are as vulnerable to conflicts of interest as researchers are, the authors warned, because “expert clinicians are also those who are likely to receive honoraria, speakers bureau [fees], consulting fees or research support from industry.” They called the current cardiac-research agenda “strongly influenced by industry’s natural desire to introduce new products.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise that I also discovered others puzzling over cardiologists who recommended pacemakers for relatives with advanced dementia. “78-year-old mother-in-law has dementia; severe short-term memory issues,” read an Internet post by “soninlaw” on Elderhope.com, a caregivers’ site, in 2007. “On a routine trip to her cardiologist, doctor decides she needs a pacemaker. . . . Anyone have a similar encounter?”

By the summer of 2007, my dad had forgotten the purpose of a dinner napkin and had to be coached to remove his slippers before he tried to put on his shoes. After a lifetime of promoting my father’s health, my mother reversed course. On a routine visit, she asked Rogan to deactivate the pacemaker. “It was hard,” she later told me. “I was doing for Jeff what I would have wanted Jeff to do for me.” Rogan soon made it clear he was morally opposed. “It would have been like putting a pillow over your father’s head,” he later told me.

Not long afterward, my mother declined additional medical tests and refused to put my father on a new anti-dementia drug and a blood thinner with troublesome side effects. “I take responsibility for whatever,” she wrote in her journal that summer. “Enough of all this overkill! It’s killing me! Talk about quality of life — what about mine?”

Then came the autumn day when she asked for my help, and I said yes. I told myself that we were simply trying to undo a terrible medical mistake. I reminded myself that my dad had rejected a pacemaker when his faculties were intact. I imagined, as a bioethicist had suggested, having a 15-minute conversation with my independent, predementia father in which I saw him shaking his head in horror over any further extension of what was not a “life,” but a prolonged and attenuated dying. None of it helped. I knew that once he died, I would dream of him and miss his mute, loving smiles. I wanted to melt into the arms of the father I once had and ask him to handle this. Instead, I felt as if I were signing on as his executioner and that I had no choice.

Over the next five months, my mother and I learned many things. We were told, by the Hemlock Society’s successor, Compassion and Choices, that as my father’s medical proxy, my mother had the legal right to ask for the withdrawal of any treatment and that the pacemaker was, in theory at least, a form of medical treatment. We learned that although my father’s living will requested no life support if he were comatose or dying, it said nothing about dementia and did not define a pacemaker as life support. We learned that if we called 911, emergency medical technicians would not honor my father’s do-not-resuscitate order unless he wore a state-issued orange hospital bracelet. We also learned that no cardiology association had given its members clear guidance on when, or whether, deactivating pacemakers was ethical.

(Last month that changed. The Heart Rhythm Society and the American Heart Association issued guidelines declaring that patients or their legal surrogates have the moral and legal right to request the withdrawal of any medical treatment, including an implanted cardiac device. It said that deactivating a pacemaker was neither euthanasia nor assisted suicide, and that a doctor could not be compelled to do so in violation of his moral values. In such cases, it continued, doctors “cannot abandon the patient but should involve a colleague who is willing to carry out the procedure.” This came, of course, too late for us.)

In the spring of 2008, things got even worse. My father took to roaring like a lion at his caregivers. At home in California, I searched the Internet for a sympathetic cardiologist and a caregiver to put my Dad to bed at night. My frayed mother began to shout at him, and their nighttime scenes were heartbreaking and frightening. An Alzheimer’s Association support-group leader suggested that my brothers and I fly out together and institutionalize my father. This leader did not know my mother’s formidable will and had never heard her speak about her wedding vows or her love.

Meanwhile my father drifted into what nurses call “the dwindles”: not sick enough to qualify for hospice care, but sick enough to never get better. He fell repeatedly at night and my mother could not pick him up. Finally, he was weak enough to qualify for palliative care, and a team of nurses and social workers visited the house. His chest grew wheezy. My mother did not request antibiotics. In mid-April 2008, he was taken by ambulance to Middlesex Hospital’s hospice wing, suffering from pneumonia.

Pneumonia was once called “the old man’s friend” for its promise of an easy death. That’s not what I saw when I flew in. On morphine, unreachable, his eyes shut, my beloved father was breathing as hard and regularly as a machine.

My mother sat holding his hand, weeping and begging for forgiveness for her impatience. She sat by him in agony. She beseeched his doctors and nurses to increase his morphine dose and to turn off the pacemaker. It was a weekend, and the doctor on call at Rogan’s cardiology practice refused authorization, saying that my father “might die immediately.” And so came five days of hard labor. My mother and I stayed by him in shifts, while his breathing became increasingly ragged and his feet slowly started to turn blue. I began drafting an appeal to the hospital ethics committee. My brothers flew in.

On a Tuesday afternoon, with my mother at his side, my father stopped breathing. A hospice nurse hung a blue light on the outside of his hospital door. Inside his chest, his pacemaker was still quietly pulsing.

After his memorial service in the Wesleyan University chapel, I carried a box from the crematory into the woods of an old convent where he and I often walked. It was late April, overcast and cold. By the side of a stream, I opened the box, scooped out a handful of ashes and threw them into the swirling water. There were some curious spiraled metal wires, perhaps the leads of his pacemaker, mixed with the white dust and pieces of bone.

A year later, I took my mother to meet a heart surgeon in a windowless treatment room at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She was 84, with two leaking heart valves. Her cardiologist had recommended open-heart surgery, and I was hoping to find a less invasive approach. When the surgeon asked us why we were there, my mother said, “To ask questions.” She was no longer a trusting and deferential patient. Like me, she no longer saw doctors — perhaps with the exception of Fales — as healers or her fiduciaries. They were now skilled technicians with their own agendas. But I couldn’t help feeling that something precious — our old faith in a doctor’s calling, perhaps, or in a healing that is more than a financial transaction or a reflexive fixing of broken parts — had been lost.

The surgeon was forthright: without open-heart surgery, there was a 50-50 chance my mother would die within two years. If she survived the operation, she would probably live to be 90. And the risks? He shrugged. Months of recovery. A 5 percent chance of stroke. Some possibility, he acknowledged at my prompting, of postoperative cognitive decline. (More than half of heart-bypass patients suffer at least a 20 percent reduction in mental function.) My mother lifted her trouser leg to reveal an anklet of orange plastic: her do-not-resuscitate bracelet. The doctor recoiled. No, he would not operate with that bracelet in place. It would not be fair to his team. She would be revived if she collapsed. “If I have a stroke,” my mother said, nearly in tears, “I want you to let me go.” What about a minor stroke, he said — a little weakness on one side?

I kept my mouth shut. I was there to get her the information she needed and to support whatever decision she made. If she emerged from surgery intellectually damaged, I would bring her to a nursing home in California and try to care for her the way she had cared for my father at such cost to her own health. The thought terrified me.

The doctor sent her up a floor for an echocardiogram. A half-hour later, my mother came back to the waiting room and put on her black coat. “No,” she said brightly, with the clarity of purpose she had shown when she asked me to have the pacemaker deactivated. “I will not do it.”

She spent the spring and summer arranging house repairs, thinning out my father’s bookcases and throwing out the files he collected so lovingly for the book he never finished writing. She told someone that she didn’t want to leave a mess for her kids. Her chest pain worsened, and her breathlessness grew severe. “I’m aching to garden,” she wrote in her journal. “But so it goes. ACCEPT ACCEPT ACCEPT.”

Last August, she had a heart attack and returned home under hospice care. One evening a month later, another heart attack. One of my brothers followed her ambulance to the hospice wing where we had sat for days by my father’s bed. The next morning, she took off her silver earrings and told the nurses she wanted to stop eating and drinking, that she wanted to die and never go home. Death came to her an hour later, while my brother was on the phone to me in California — almost as mercifully as it had come to my paternal grandfather. She was continent and lucid to her end.

A week later, at the same crematory near Long Island Sound, my brothers and I watched through a plate-glass window as a cardboard box containing her body, dressed in a scarlet silk ao dai she had sewn herself, slid into the flames. The next day, the undertaker delivered a plastic box to the house where, for 45 of their 61 years together, my parents had loved and looked after each other, humanly and imperfectly. There were no bits of metal mixed with the fine white powder and the small pieces of her bones.

Katy Butler lives in Mill Valley, Calif., and teaches memoir writing at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur.

Here's what wiki has to say about Ford and his high wages -- that he called profit sharing for qualified workers. Started in 1914. By the Great Depression, no more profits, I guess, and therefore no more high wages:

Ford was a pioneer of "welfare capitalism", designed to improve the lot of his workers and especially to reduce the heavy turnover that had many departments hiring 300 men per year to fill 100 slots. Efficiency meant hiring and keeping the best workers.[20]

Ford astonished the world in 1914 by offering a $5 per day wage ($120 today), which more than doubled the rate of most of his workers.[21] A Cleveland, Ohio newspaper editorialized that the announcement "shot like a blinding rocket through the dark clouds of the present industrial depression."[22] The move proved extremely profitable; instead of constant turnover of employees, the best mechanics in Detroit flocked to Ford, bringing their human capital and expertise, raising productivity, and lowering training costs.[23][24] Ford announced his $5-per-day program on January 5, 1914, raising the minimum daily pay from $2.34 to $5 for qualifying workers. It also set a new, reduced workweek, although the details vary in different accounts. Ford and Crowther in 1922 described it as six 8-hour days, giving a 48-hour week,[25] while in 1926 they described it as five 8-hour days, giving a 40-hour week.[26] (Apparently the program started with Saturdays as workdays and sometime later it was changed to a day off.)

Detroit was already a high-wage city, but competitors were forced to raise wages or lose their best workers.[27] Ford's policy proved, however, that paying people more would enable Ford workers to afford the cars they were producing and be good for the economy. Ford explained the policy as profit-sharing rather than wages.[28] It may have been Couzens who convinced Ford to adopt the $5 day.[29]

The profit-sharing was offered to employees who had worked at the company for six months or more, and, importantly, conducted their lives in a manner of which Ford's "Social Department" approved. They frowned on heavy drinking, gambling, and what might today be called "deadbeat dads". The Social Department used 50 investigators, plus support staff, to maintain employee standards; a large percentage of workers were able to qualify for this "profit-sharing."

Ford's incursion into his employees' private lives was highly controversial, and he soon backed off from the most intrusive aspects. By the time he wrote his 1922 memoir, he spoke of the Social Department and of the private conditions for profit-sharing in the past tense, and admitted that "paternalism has no place in industry. Welfare work that consists in prying into employees' private concerns is out of date. Men need counsel and men need help, oftentimes special help; and all this ought to be rendered for decency's sake. But the broad workable plan of investment and participation will do more to solidify industry and strengthen organization than will any social work on the outside. Without changing the principle we have changed the method of payment."[30]

>> ^RFlagg:

I am confused by the people blaming the woman for getting pregnant and saying she chose to have sex... so did the guy, who also chose to have sex without adequate measures to prevent the pregnancy. Why is the guy always absolved of guilt when a woman gets pregnant? "Oh she got pregnant just to trap him." Really? He chose to have sex too, he chose to have sex without wearing protection and pulling out and insuring she was up to date on her birth control. Is abortion the best outcome? No, but it has to remain a valid choice, especially in cases of incest and rape... and any ass who would deny it when the mother's life is in danger should just be denied any sort of medical care (even Tylenol) for the rest of their lives. The best way to counter abortion is to do the things Republicans hate, increase education (and I'm not just talking sex education here, though that should be included, but education as a whole) and increase access to affordable health care, including contraception for both parties.
A few points to clarify my position.


- I don't think this is about choosing to have unprotected sex. It's about choosing to have sex. Few methods of birth control are infallible. Condoms break, people forget to take a pill. The choice to engage in sexual intercourse is a choice which carries consequences. Contraceptives decrease the risk of pregnancy, dramatically, but the risk still exists.
- I don't consider this an issue of blame or guilt. It's about responsibility. It's not a woman's "fault" she got pregnant. Pregnancy is a potential consequence of her choice, which, again, it is her right to make.
- The male in this picture is also free to choose whether to have sex. Is it fair that he can up and split, because he is not physically carrying a developing human being? No, it's not fair, but it's the reality of the situation. Even so, the courts acknowledge that he must take responsibility as well. Jerry Springer made a sideshow out of paternity testing.

- Which raises a counterpoint I'd never considered before - should a man be allowed to compel a woman to have an abortion, because he does not feel capable of supporting the child? If the woman carries and delivers the child and he abandons them, the courts will hold him responsible for child support, even if he strongly advocated the pregnancy be terminated.

Must be a girl dog - paternal instinct and all. I had a doberman, dumbest dog in the world, but super loyal and placid when he wasnt being an absolute nutbag running around the yard due to boredom.

Man I miss that dog.

>> ^mgittle:

>> ^bcglorf:
>> ^mgittle:
@dannym3141
That's the point of this occupywallst thing. It doesn't require an inspiring figure or a set of demands or goals to achieve. It's like when someone who's always thought there was something wrong with their religious beliefs meets an atheist and has that realization that there are other people out there who are having the same thoughts as they are. It's a pretty powerful thing.
I agree that protests seem more effective when they have specific goals, but why does this specific protest need a goal today . I think it's better to stand up and say the whole "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore". Work out the details later.
The Arab protest movements didn't start with any inspiring figures or well thought out sets of goals. Sure, they were probably a little more geared towards getting rid of their governments, but those governments had figureheads. Wall Street has no single figurehead at which people can direct their anger. How do you kill a beast with no head?
I think we're seeing something new here...a protest with no head to kill the beast with no head. A true battle of mindsets. This is the new culture war.

The Arab spring had a very clear goal, to remove a dictatorship and replace it with democracy. They weren't just mad at the world and burn it all down. They had a very specific alternative already in mind that they were demanding. You demean their plight and deaths for the right to vote by claiming kinship between it and this vague, I'm mad cause I wanna be rich too rumbling.

Yeah, maybe it's a first world plight and it's not as "fight or flight" "life and death" as the Arab spring, but I don't think it's right to differentiate struggles against the concentration of power the way you're suggesting. That's like how people argue that soldiers with PTSD shouldn't get a purple heart because they didn't shed blood. Yes, it's different, but it's still an injury. You can argue that health care is a life and death struggle as well. Hell, I'd almost rather we were fighting for our lives in the literal sense...then maybe people would realize that dying from lack of health care is still dying. The fact that you didn't get shot or die in a terrorist attack doesn't change that. Dead is dead.
I don't think the wall st. protesters are just "rumbling", nor do I think they want to just "burn it all down". It's also ridiculous to say that they "wanna be rich too".


Your missing my central point. The Arab spring protesters were not just opposing something worse and more sinister, the equally important point is that they were protesting to advocate for something better.

Please articulate for me what it is that the occupy wall street crowd wants. Do they have a solution they are advocating for? Without advocating for a solution to the problem, they are just rumbling and lobbying to fix the problem by burning it down. Or maybe in terms that you'd more willingly agree with, without advocating for a solution, they are leaving it in the hands of the elite to come up with the solution. That kind of paternal attitude though is at the heart of the problem.

Wow, the staggering hypocrisy of Kelly just blows my mind. How can she advocate for paid maternity leave on one hand and rail against socialised medicine on the other? Typical of the right wing in america... hate big government until it's paying you money.

For the record, I am 100% in favour of both paid maternity and paternity leave, and I don't plan to have kids.

>> ^chilaxe:

So you're arguing against markets (meritocracy)

Markets aren't meritocracy.
>> ^chilaxe:

and in favor of collectivism & experientialism ('feel good' degrees paid for by somebody else)

Honestly, I don't really know what I'm in favor of. Given all the discussions I have here, I'm pretty sure your conception of "collectivism" differs from mine, and I only have a vague notion of what you're trying to say when you refer to "experientialism." It doesn't matter though, because your parenthetical ascribes a position to me that I have already explicitly disavowed (along with the premise it's based on).
>> ^chilaxe:
It does seem relevant then whether or not meritocracy causes greater contributions to humankind

It's no more relevant than talking about the ecological impact of unicorn migration, seeing how meritocracy doesn't exist.
>> ^chilaxe:
(it appears to, if we compare my outcomes to those of my lazy collectivist friends)

Anecdotes aren't data. Especially considering the cognitive biases of the source.
>> ^chilaxe:
"Would you really stop working on it if you got paid less, or if everyone got paid the same no matter what they did?"
Yes I would, and that's one of the reasons I stopped working in academia early on.
I'm asking you to respond to a hypothetical, specifically what would you do if material wealth wasn't connected to how you spent your time? Would you just become a couch potato? Or would you still feel driven to do something worthwhile, because being idle doesn't appeal to you?

I think if you are who you say you are, you'd still choose to do things that are useful and meaningful to society in such a situation. I know I would.

>> ^chilaxe:
I realized most human problems are self-caused and aren't relevant to rationalists (same as the make-believe problem of student loans).

Too bad you aren't a rationalist, then.
>> ^chilaxe:
But fortunately it's not generally necessary to make the choice between passion and career... individuals have general interests, and they can follow the most socioeconomically valued paths within those interests.

Sure it is. Who becomes a janitor because it was their passion? Lots of people get channeled into jobs that don't align with their passions, largely for reasons beyond their control.

As for "socioeconomically valued paths" my point is that that's a pretty strong external constraint on your ability to choose how to live your life, and that "freedom" doesn't entail making those constraints and pressures stronger.

One can make the argument that a society with that level of paternalism is more beneficial for everyone (I sometimes even believe that myself), but one can't seriously contend that such pressures constitute the very definition of freedom.

But if your goal for society is to promote rationality, markets aren't your mechanism.

Bill Nye doesn't get paid more than Sean Hannity, and Judge Judy gets paid more than the entire Supreme Court. There is no meritocracy, and there is no connection between rational behavior and their reward. Hannity and Judge Judy both would probably lose their jobs if they started publicly promoting rationality instead of inanity. Not to mention, Paris Hilton can probably buy and sell them all.

One can play a certain shell game with this, and say that it's rational for the producers to pay Hannity to be publicly inane because it's going to make them money, but this just further amplifies my point -- markets give rational people incentive to do irrational and destructive things, like give Sean Hannity a TV show, or try to rig the real-estate market, or to base a business on encouraging young women to become prostitutes.

I would hardly call intrinsic and paternal big words.... But anyway, heres why i said what i did, he rapid fires the mba to paternalistic phrase and then as soon as he's done with it he has to pause and search for words. I.e. he heard it, was briefed on it or whatever, memorized it and then when it came time to speak his own thoughts he flubbed for a second.

Im going to guess he knew/assumed he was going to get interviewed or talked to....but wtv maybe not....maybe so

>> ^packo:

>> ^Confucius:
mhmmm...i can dredge sense out of what he said....i was talking about how he seemed blank eyed, and looked like he was parroting something 'shiny' he heard.

>> ^budzos:
>> ^Confucius:
Kudos to him for sticking up for teachers so much....but uh...anyone else have the feeling hes just stringing together words and hoping they make sense?
and ......watch the whole video...this reporter blows

No. What he's saying is something I say a lot lately about different things not relating to education. This "MBA" world view that money (AKA job security) is the only motivator to do a good job is "paternalistic" nonsense. Teachers need job security, but job security is not what makes a good teacher a good teacher. Job security allows good teachers to remain focussed on being good teachers.
The best way to motivate people is to give them something worth doing.


seemd to me he was doing more of a Bill Nye, wait my brain has to dumb itself down to talk to this chick, - type stall
big words aren't scary, learn them and increase your vocabulary kungfu
much like you dress for the job you want
you need to speak at the level of conversation your want

Also recommend Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978).

Terrence Malick is among my top ten favorite filmmakers... along with Fellini, Bergman, Scorcese, Lynch, von Triers, and others...

this one looks good -- strange casting, tho, to put Pitt in the role of the father.. maybe it's because the audience already knows him as a sort of "young stud," and not the paternal type...

>> ^Sarzy:

I, too, get a Fountain vibe (which is one of the most underrated movies of the last decade).
And I haven't seen the Thin Red Line yet, a mistake I shall soon rectify. But man, this is such a great trailer. I think I've watched it around five times this afternoon, and it's still blowing me away. promote

What I'm surprised most about is how so many people who profess to be of a particular religion but haven't read its holy book, let alone struggle to name the chapters of the text, or even in terms of Christianity, something as basic as the 10 commandments. I mean, here is a piece of literature that will determine whether you spend ETERNITY in hell, and yet haven't studied it?

It's like calling yourself a sailor when you've never been out to sea.

That's the simplest evidence to me at least that most people simply choose to be religious because it eases their fear about death, provides a 'supposedly' loving paternal figure to watch over them, or allows them to fit into a peer group with the least amount of friction.

I, uncharacteristically, wrote a comment, browser crashed, no way I am going to rewrite....I was wrong anyway.

However, for context, a warm, cordial, even paternal discourse by a righteous and faithful leader such as whom I call Mr M. Iammadinthehead, the Iranian president:

http://tiny.cc/kfeet

Now, someone yell FAKE!


I pretty well called it point by point earlier, huh? It was an accident.