Blogerette's Blog

Divorce Is Hard on Environment

Divorce Is Hard on Environment, Study Says

Randolph E. Schmid in Washington
Associated Press

December 4, 2007

Divorce can be bad for the environment, because it tends to result in more households and less sharing of resources, according to a study published this week.

Divorce rates are rising around the world, and each time a family dissolves, the result is two new households.

"A married household actually uses resources more efficiently than a divorced household," said Jianguo Liu, an ecologist at Michigan State University whose analysis of the environmental impact of divorce appears in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More households use more land, water, and energy—three critical resources, Liu explained in a telephone interview.

Households with fewer people are simply not as efficient as those with more people sharing, he explained. A household uses the same amount of heat or air conditioning whether there are two or four people living there.

A refrigerator uses the same power whether one person is home or several are. Two people living apart run two dishwashers, instead of just one.

"People have been talking about how to protect the environment and combat climate change," Liu said. "Divorce is an overlooked factor that needs to be considered."

It Adds Up

Liu, who researches the relationship between ecology and social sciences, said people seem surprised by his findings at first and then consider it simple.

"A lot of things become simple after the research is done," he said.

Some extra energy or water use may not sound like a big deal, but it adds up.

The United States, for example, had 16.5 million households headed by a divorced person in 2005 and just over 60 million households headed by a married person.

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Saudi Women Lobby King for Driving Right

The Associated Press
By DONNA ABU-NASR

JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — For the first time ever, a group of women in the only country that bans female drivers have formed a committee to lobby for the right to get behind the wheel, and they plan to petition King Abdullah in the next few days for the privilege.

The government is unlikely to respond because the issue remains so highly sensitive and divisive. But committee members say their petition will at least highlight what many Saudis — both men and women — consider a "stolen" right.

"We would like to remind officials that this is, as many have said, a social and not a religious or political issue," said Fowziyyah al-Oyouni, a founding member of the Committee of Demanders of Women's Right to Drive Cars. "And since it's a social issue, we have the right to lobby for it."

Committee members want to deliver their petition to the king by Sunday, Saudi Arabia's national day.

The driving ban applies to all women, Saudi and foreign, and forces families to hire live-in drivers. Women whose families cannot afford $300-$400 a month for a driver must rely on male relatives to drive them to work, school, shopping or the doctor's.

The last time the issue was raised was two years ago, when Mohammed al-Zulfa, a member of the unelected Consultative Council, asked his colleagues to think about studying the possibility of allowing women over age 35 or 40 to drive — unchaperoned on city streets but accompanied by a male guardian on highways.

The suggestion touched off a fierce controversy that included calls for al-Zulfa's removal from the council and stripping him of Saudi citizenship, as well as accusations he was encouraging women to commit the double sins of discarding their veils and mixing with men.

The uproar underscored the divisions in Saudi society between the guardians of its super-strict Islamic codes of behavior and those who want to usher in more liberal attitudes.

Conservatives, who believe women should be shielded from male strangers, say women in the driver's seat will be free to leave home alone and go when and where they please. They also will unduly expose their eyes while driving and interact with male strangers, such as traffic police and mechanics.

But supporters of female drivers say the prohibition exists neither in law nor Islam, but is based on fatwas, or edicts, by senior clerics who say women at the wheel create situations for sinful temptation.

Women tried to defy the ban once and paid heavily for it. In November 1990, when U.S. troops were in Saudi Arabia following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, some 50 women got behind the wheel and drove family cars. They were jailed for one day, their passports were confiscated and they lost their jobs.

Although the furor over al-Zulfa's comments has abated, anything that touches on the issue provokes strong feelings.

In the weeks ushering in the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, which began Thursday, a furious debate erupted in a Saudi newspaper over a Ramadan television serial that takes up the hardships the ban has caused.

In the serial, "Amsha bint Ammash," the main character, Amsha, loses her father and is forced to relocate from her village to Jiddah. After an unsuccessful round of job searching, she decides to become a taxi driver — a job open only to men.

To get around the ban, she disguises herself as a man, adding a mustache and donning the white robe and red-and-white-checkered headdress Saudi men wear.

When the program was first advertised, some reacted with shock that a Saudi woman was not only portraying a man, but also one who drives. Conservatives say women should not emulate men in behavior or dress.

The controversy has forced the serial's writer, Abdullah Abdul-Amer, to issue a statement stressing the goal of the program, aired on the Lebanese satellite channel LBC, "is not to incite women to drive."

"All I wanted to do was raise our contemporary issues from a Saudi viewpoint and through comedy," said Abdul-Amer.

But that has not appeased Saudis determined to uphold the driving ban.

In a letter to Al-Hayat daily titled "Amsha, we don't need you," reader Iman Abdul-Wahhab wondered why the driving issue "has become an obsession for many, Saudis and non-Saudis."

"Has this become a weak point for us?" she wrote. "As a Saudi girl, I say, 'No.'"

"This is a tradition that has become acceptable," she added. "No one has any right to use it as a means to mock or ridicule."

On Monday, another Saudi newspaper, Al-Watan, ran an article about a major car dealership sending out invitations for women in Jiddah to come try out a new family sedan for 24 hours. But the dealership stressed the invitation was for women and their drivers, who are the only ones permitted to test-drive the cars.

Al-Oyouni said she understands that some women oppose ending the ban.

"We won't force it on those who don't want it," she said.

The petition, circulated electronically for signatures, has received a lot of support from within the kingdom, from both men and women, as well as from outside Saudi Arabia, al-Oyouni said. "This is a right that has been delayed for too long."

Picky Eater? It's in the Genes

Having trouble persuading your child to eat broccoli or spinach? You may have only yourself to blame. According to a study of twins, neophobia — or the fear of new foods — is mostly in the genes.

"Children could actually blame their mothers for this," said Jane Wardle, director of the Health Behavior Unit at University College London, one of the authors of the study in this month's American Journal of Clinical Nutrition

Wardle and colleagues asked the parents of 5,390 pairs of identical and non-identical twins to complete a questionnaire on their children's' willingness to try new foods.

Identical twins, who share all genes, were much more likely to respond the same way to new foods than non-identical twins, who like other siblings only share about half their genes. Researchers concluded that genetics played a greater role in determining eating preferences than environment, since the twins lived in the same household.

Wardle said food preferences appear to be "as inheritable a physical characteristic as height."

Unlike nearly every other phobia, neophobia is a normal stage of human development.

Scientists theorize that it was originally an evolutionary mechanism designed to protect children from accidentally eating dangerous things — like poisonous berries or mushrooms.

Neophobia typically kicks in at age 2 or 3, when children are newly mobile and capable of disappearing from their parents' sight within seconds. Being unwilling to eat new things they stumble upon may turn out to be a lifesaver.

While most children grow out of the food fussiness by age 5, not all do. For parents of particularly picky eaters, experts encourage them not to cave in when their children throw food tantrums.

"Parents should not feel like they're doing something wrong if they keep trying but their child is not overjoyed to be eating Brussels sprouts," said Marlene Schwartz, deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, who is not connected to the study.

While most people will eventually like any food — even one they initially disliked — after trying it about 10 times, more persistence may be needed when trying to convert a neophobic child.

"It's like learning to ride a bike," Schwartz said. "Some children have a harder time learning and it takes longer, but it's still worthwhile to teach them."

Other taste-related traits — like the ability to taste bitterness — are also inherited. Scientists have already identified the gene responsible, and have found that approximately 30 percent of Caucasians lack the gene and cannot taste bitterness.

Some experts think that neophobia is essentially a reflection of personality. People known as "sensation seekers," or those in search of new and intense experiences, tend to be willing to eat anything. Conversely, shy people tend to be reluctant to experiment with their palate.

"Food is just one kind of stimulus in the environment that people either approach or avoid," said Patricia Pliner, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.

Still, experts say that the environment parents create is crucial to determining their children's eating habits.

"It can't all be genetics," said Marcy Goldsmith, a nutrition and behavior specialist at Tufts University. "Parents need to offer their children new foods so they at least have a chance to try it."

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Do you want to be happy?

TIME has a very interesting feature on how to be happy. It lists a number of tips that you can follow to integrate some specific actions in your daily life that would help you become a happier person.

Here they are:

1- Count your blessings

2- Hear the music

3- Get it on

4- Nurture your spirituality

5- Move your body

6- Laugh big

7- Do something nice for someone else

8- Make more money than your peers

9- Seek positive emotion

10- Identify with your culture

Each tip comes with a clear explanation of what it means, and also with proper evidence that it will help you become happier! There are some ten tips more, check them out!

Bushism of the Day II

"My relationship with this good man is where I've been focused, and that's where my concentration is. And I don't regret any other aspect of it. And so I—we filled a lot of space together."—on British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Washington, D.C., May 17, 2007

Source

Bushism of the Day

"Forms of government matter, in my opinion. It matters how—the nature of the government in which people live."—Tipp City, Ohio, April 19, 2007

Source: Slate

Link: http://www.slate.com/id/2166103/

When Your Spouse is Hotter than You

By BELINDA LUSCOMBE

Marrying outside your religion is no big deal anymore. Neither is marrying someone of a completely different generation. And now that something like 4% of all marriages are interracial, not even your grandparents will get lathered up if you marry someone of another color. But as the old prohibitions fall away, a new one is rising to take their place. It's a discrimination that's widespread but largely unspoken, causing pain and stress to the affected couples, who often find it hard to talk about, even to each other. I'm talking, of course, about marrying outside your looks. Marrying a few degrees up or down the hotness scale. Refusing to stay within your cute-gory.

I've been in a mixed marriage for a decade and a half now and gotten used to the stares and nudges. I've even developed a couple of airy responses to the inevitable comments that arise from co-workers and friends along the lines of "Um, your husband is so hot..." Sometimes I go with "Oh, that's not my husband--that's my twin brother," and other times a dismissive "Yeah, but back in Australia I'm considered a great beauty. It's Nicole Kidman who's the hag." Each time, it hurts just a little less.

Like so many in my situation, I didn't mean to intermarry. It wasn't that I had ideas above my station; it was just that I was young and naive enough to think love would conquer all. Also, to be perfectly frank, I didn't think he was that hot. That's what makes this type of discrimination particularly insidious: it's not clear that couples have transgressed against hotness-equality laws until they're already married. Nobody minds if you date outside your tribe, and people applaud an ambitious play for the hubba-hubba human across the room, but--as my brothers and sisters in the gay community have found--there's a world of difference between what people will accept in the innocent suburbs of hooking up and the judgmental metropolis of marriage.

As in so many other areas of discrimination, women face double jeopardy. Guys who marry a few rungs up the looks ladder are rock stars or rich or have, I don't know, beautiful penmanship. Women who marry up, well, they're deluded. Their husbands must be gay or have really bad bacne to even look at them. And the standards are ridiculous. Deborra-Lee Furness is a charming, spirited, good-looking woman who happens to be married to Hugh Jackman, a freak of nature. Hence rumors circulate that Jackman is gay. Had there been an Internet in times gone by, they probably would have swirled around Queen Victoria's and Eleanor Roosevelt's husbands as well.

Shockingly few peer-reviewed studies have been done on our type of union. We don't yet have our own box to check on the Census, even though we've been around for years. I'm actually the product of a mixed marriage. My father has an unlined face and thick, curly salt-and-pepper hair in his 70s. My mother--well, let's just say that when she comes to visit, the kids hide the broomstick and the big cooking pot. She tells folks my dad married her for her legs and her fortune. Coincidentally, these are the only two of her attributes she did not pass along to me.

If you suspect that you might be in an interfacial marriage, don't be ashamed. Acceptance is the first step to recovery. Ask yourself these questions: Do you and your spouse disagree on how many mirrors should be in the home, what angle they're placed at and how well they're lit? Do you find yourself taking all the photographs at family gatherings and "forgetting" how to use the self-timer? If your spouse buys you some beauty products, do you take it as a kind of warning? Do you ever encourage your spouse to wear those pants that make him or her look beamy?

These are all challenges that scummy-yummy couples must deal with to survive. And that's before you get to the big questions: Do you raise the children as attractive or hideous? Or try to find a middle ground--you know, sorta cute? Do you celebrate beautiful-people holidays (Valentine's Day, Mardi Gras) or Oktoberfest? Very few mismatched pairs can work through these issues on their own.

What they--who am I kidding, we--desperately need is a celebrity spokescouple, a famous mixed-assortment pair willing to step into the limelight and explain the challenges specific to this unequal yoking. Maybe then people would have a little compassion for those of us who, through no fault of our own, have to wake up every single day to a drop-dead gorgeous human being on the other pillow, for the love of mercy! Donald and Melania Trump, are you reading this? Ric Ocasek and Paulina Porizkova? Sylvester Stallone and Jennifer Flavin? Larry King and whomever you're married to now? Your people need you!

First question: How did you score such a hottie?

Source: TIME

Link: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1615172,00.html

Working Women and Changing Physique

Here's an interesting comic that sums it all up:

Down With Happiness

Drugs. Implants. Virtual reality. Do we really want joy 24/7?

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed a universal right to the pursuit of happiness. The key word there is pursuit. Jefferson thought that people ought to be free to chase after happiness; whether they attained it was their own business. In the 18th century, the technology to get happy despite circumstance or personality did not exist. Now, though, it's on its way — and that's not as delightful as it sounds.

What constitutes happiness? Freedom from worry? Or maybe contentment? A good definition remains elusive despite decades of neuroscience and psychiatry. Many researchers today have come to think that people have affect set points and that some of us are naturally happier than others. In describing optimal experience — the subjective state of happiness he calls flow — the psychiatrist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says it comes down to engaging in activities just beyond our skill level. Like Jefferson, Csikszent mihalyi understands that pursuit, and not outcome, is what's important.

Being reductionist about happiness doesn't mean it isn't fun, in all its myriad forms — free-floating rapture, blissed-out contentment, ecstatic partying. It's just that as a species, we generally keep these experiences in check. After all, the ways to induce them — alcohol, drugs, OK Go concerts — have historically come at a high cost.

We're entering an age in which technology may allow us to produce pleasant sensations all the time. Hints of that future go back to Prozac and other neurotransmitter-controlling drugs introduced in the late 1980s. But our ability to manipulate the molecules and electrical impulses whizzing through our heads is reaching a newly sophisticated level. Precise brain scanning is creating a vast trove of information about what happens psychologically, physiologically, and chemically when we are happy or sad (or stressed, angry, loving, homicidal, spiritual, or altruistic).

The narcolepsy drug Provigil turns out to make people feel pretty fabulous and is taken as a stimulant. Ecstasy use has declined and cocaine use seems to have leveled off, but use of the ADHD prescription drug Adderall — increased focus, higher productivity — is on the rise. Today, neural implants are used to treat more than 30,000 people worldwide with Parkinson's disease; someday soon they might reliably jolt regions of the brain to induce or suppress specific emotions. "There is an industry of sorts that is trying to seduce you," says Oxford University pharmacologist Susan Greenfield, author of Tomorrow's People: How 21st-Century Technology Is Changing the Way We Think and Feel. "They want you to lose yourself, to want more of their product, whether it's virtual reality or a pill."

Obviously, sick people — say, with Parkinson's or narcolepsy — need medical intervention. And some percentage of humans will seek out mood-altering substances or experiences that imperil their lives. The problems start when happy-making tech nologies can be plugged in all day long without any of the traditional limits. I'm certainly not against technology. But should we use it to cure insecurity? Normal anxiety? We risk medicalizing the human condition.

From a distance, pleasure without fear or desire sounds pretty good. But in your grasp, it starts to feel less like paradise and more like soma. A species that shuts out adversity does not survive very long in a Darwinian universe. In the short term, humans with happy-making neural implants would cease to be interesting. Quenching feelings of hardship also means never feeling desire or want. Unpleasant as those emotions can be, they're also the basis for ambition and creativity. "Happy people are not ambitious," Greenfield says. "They do not build civilizations."

Ultimately, the problem could be self-correcting. As rich Westerners buy all the happiness products they can jam into their amygdalas, the developing world will be left blissfully productive. A good thing, because places like China and India have mighty new cities and wealth to build.

Maybe it's no coincidence that some of the happy-making stuff is manufactured in those countries. It's reminiscent of the scenario laid out by another prescient thinker, H. G. Wells. In his book The Time Machine, Wells wrote about a world where the happy, indolent elite — the Eloi — are served by industrious outsiders called Morlocks. The Eloi are also the hardworking Morlocks' food. Grim stuff. And also the exact opposite of what Jefferson was trying to tee up for Americans. Maybe he knew that if you have too much happiness, you don't get life and liberty.

Source: Wired Magazine

Link: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.05/st_essay.html

Muslim Feminists: They Do Exist

Feminism is a major philosophy in my life, as well as in the lives of many Muslim women. I came upon an article in the Guardian blog that talks about Islamic Feminism, and I am sharing it:

Islamic feminists on the move

Victoria Brittain

The western media and conservative Islam are ignoring the growing current of Islamic feminism which has much to offer in bridging the divide, especially in Europe's cities.

Islamic feminism is a rising current of political activism in Europe, North Africa, and Asia, and a force for changing the image of Islam. Next weekend in Brussels sees the fifth meeting of some of its protagonists under the heading: "Towards an emerging Islamic feminist consciousness in Europe".

In Europe's divided cities, after the bombings of Madrid and London, the cliche of desperate, young, marginalised, Muslim men ready to commit suicide bombings, a different image of Islam has never been more relevant.

Muslim societies, from Afghanistan where female teachers are singled out for killing by a resurgent Taliban, to Saudi Arabia where women are not allowed to drive or travel alone, reinforce for the western media the stereotypes of Muslim women's inferior place. All this comforts a certain western notion of superiority. Tell people you are going to a conference on Islamic feminism, and the response is mocking laughter.

However, Islamic feminism is alive and well, from Western Europe to Malaysia, and from North Africa to the US - far from the stereotypes of Islam and of feminism as a western movement.

But the powers of conventional Islam, and western media preconceptions, both have their own reasons for ignoring the phenomenon of strongly Muslim, very activist women who claim that complete equality for women both in private life and in public, and a host of other radical reforms, can be read in true Islamic scholarship.

In the Quran, they say, men and women are both equal, and complementary, with the same rights to education and self-fulfillment. "Islam gives women a very high position and a lot of rights, but over the years the patriarchal system and political power have marginalised women and made them invisible - it's a gross misunderstanding which has to be corrected. Women should reclaim their rights given by Islam," says the Malaysian artist, Yati, whose group is called Sisters in Islam.

Malika Hamidi, coordinator of the European Muslim Network, and the main speaker next weekend, is a young academic. She underlines the complexity of the emerging current and the "pluralism in the Muslim women's movement - as in western feminism". Most of these women wear headscarves, but not all of them, nor all the time.

Not all these activist women accept the "feminist" tag: to some its image is too white, or too western, or too secular, or simply too American. But Ismahane Chouder, vice-president of the Collectif des Feminists pour l'Egalité (Feminist Collective for Equality), says, "I'm a western, Muslim, feminist, and I work on campaigns across the board for all women's rights."

And in the UK, the Birmingham councillor and vice-chair of the Stop the War Movement, Salma Yacoob, speaks for many when she says she feels "a debt to an earlier generation of women who struggled for their rights - it would be disrespectful to ignore them ... so, despite 'feminist' being a loaded word in the community, I do define myself as an Islamic feminist".

Embattled Muslim women, suffering the burdens of the worst cultural attitudes to rape and adultery enshrined in medieval laws in Pakistan and Northern Nigeria; or the sexual violence and rolling back of their rights, unleashed by the war in Iraq; or the targeted killings of women activists in Afghanistan, are turning for help to Muslim women's groups. From those in Morocco and Malaysia, in particular, the skills of self-help training, experience of long legal battles, linking scholars and activists, are in great demand.

At government policy levels some, Islamic women activists' campaigns are having successes large and small in some surprising places: Morocco's Moudawana (religious personal statute laws differing from civil law) have recently been revised after 30 years of struggle; in Turkey's Ministry of Religion there is a cautious beginning by some scholars to work on the highly sensitive area of questioning the historical basis of the hadith (sayings and deeds attributed to the Prophet) which seem misogynist; and in Indonesia's rural areas teaching materials are being revised.

Last autumn in Paris saw the first major discussion of the subject in France, hosted at Unesco's headquarters. Belgium and Spain held similar conferences in the last two years.

"We are living in an increasingly dangerous world, people are closing in on their own identities ... we are trying to build bridges," says Alain Gresh, president of Islam et Laïcité, one of the conference organisers, and a senior journalist who has written numerous books on the Middle East.

Islamic feminism is a decade and a half old. In the 1990s Iranian, Egyptian, Turkish, Moroccan, South African, American, feminists and religious scholars, among others, found they were all simultaneously working on reinterpretations of women's rights under Islam.

But long before the phrase, "Islamic feminism", was coined, leading Muslim women intellectuals like the Moroccan writer and academic Fatima Mernissi, and Dr Asma Lamrabat, a Moroccan paediatrician, were writing and speaking for muslim women's rights and equality, and for the re-reading of the Quran. Dr Lamrabat, greatly admired by the new generation of European activists for her work on the ground as well as for her intellectual leadership, points to "the disconnect between a discourse claiming to respect spiritual values, and a reality where the worst discrimination is justified - from horrific honour crimes, forced marriages, and antiquated tribunals responsible for keeping women in inferiority for life." To her, "Islamic feminism is very important - you cant just write off feminism as western."

Malika Hamidi, who is French, of Algerian origin, points to the practical needs of Muslim women in Europe on many fronts: "victims of domestic violence, polygamy, those threatened with honour killings, circumcision, discrimination of all sorts, forced marriages, with little Turkish and Moroccan girls in Brussels just disappearing to be married. Muslim women are not involved enough in these debates, but we have to denounce that these are traditional and cultural practices - it has nothing to do with Islam."

Hamidi describes how different educated activists like her are from her parents' generation - "we are claiming public space, affirming an identity beyond wives and mothers" - and she calls for education and consciousness raising for the older generation of Muslims in Europe.

Like Hamidi, Professor Nouza Guessous, a medical biologist, human rights activist and part of the advisory commission on the reform of Moudawana in Morocco, emphasises the working links with human rights groups and left women's groups which produced the major push on law reform.

"This has been 30 years of work by the Moroccan women's movement, but with even the secular reformers accepting the arguments had to be on a religious basis, against polygamy and forced marriage, and for giving women the majority at 18. In 1982 we got a million signatures. These movements are going on across the Magreb in different ways. In practice in Morocco there is Islamic feminism, though not we do not explicitly use the term. The central issues are justice, equality, freedom of thought."

Similarly in Europe many note the new converging of religious and secular women in practical human rights campaigns not only for women, not only for Muslims, in areas such as for refugee rights, for improved housing, for girls' education, and, one great unifier, against current western policy in the Middle East.

Salma Yacoob, in Stop the War, for instance, pays tribute to the "non-Muslims whose solidarity encouraged and empowered me to play a public role". And Malika Hamidi says: "In France feminists from different tendencies and the Islamic feminists work together on many joint projects. We Islamic feminists are in a small minority, but we are in a unique position in Europe to push for reform on many fronts."

These women, from such varied backgrounds and societies, pose the London-based Eqyptian writer Dr Haifa Khalafallah's challenge to face the "deteriorating chaos" of the current violence and destruction in the Middle East, and the widening gulf, which used to be a simple one of north/south, or rich and poor, but is now a much more complex one involving ideology and culture.

Link: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/victoria_brittain/2007/01/islamic_feminism_on_the_move.html