Misadventures in the 785

We all know, because we’ve been told, that 40 ish is a difficult time for the smart lady about town.  You are not young.  You are so definitely not young!  Ha ha, you said young like it might apply to you, you are RIDICULOUS.  But also, you are not old.  Not really.  These days, 50 is the new 40, so essentially 40 is the new 30 and you are both 40 and 30 and you have gone back in time to warn your 30 year old self about the wtf is about to happen sometime around 2016, because 40 is the new 12 Monkeys.  I mean, you are basically 20.  Times have changed.  Fiona Bruce is 53 and she barely has to think about her age as a TV presenter.  It’s a pretty sweet deal for women now – they get to present programs with old things, so that they…

Coercion is illegal in the workplace, in our criminal justice system but for some reason it’s seen as a gray area when it comes to sexual activity. There are many reasons for this with patriarchy being chief among them but also the idea that women are the givers of sex and men are the takers of sex is also part of something to give thought to. And as I lay here in bed I reflecting on the conversations I’ve observed and partaken in with men over the past few days about Aziz Ansari’s “bad date” story , I keep coming back to a running list of things I wish men could understand.

• I really wish men could understand what it’s like to really like someone and want to make them happy. So you tell yourself it’s OK to let things go a little but further than a little kissing even…

Picture by Joan M. Mas

Autism is seen, in popular representations, largely as a social and communication disorder. Formerly framed as stemming from an autistic lack of a “social instinct”, the current dominant idea is that something is deficient or missing in autistic social cognition. Often referred to as a cognitive deficit in “empathy” or “theory of mind”, much research on autistic social issues has focused on trying to clarify and detect this inside autistic brains and minds. The search for an elusive broken “theory of mind module” or “empathy mechanism” in the brain, and its ensuing cognitive manifestations, however, has led to conflicting results – with some scientists even concluding that autistic people feel too much empathy rather than too little.

Another view is that this is not simply an individual neuro-cognitive issue, but rather a wider social problem. Against the idea that autistic people have too much or…

Earlier this week, ESPN sports anchor Jamele Hill tweeted that Trump is a white supremacist, which is a well known and documented fact. But this one tweet put her job in jeopardy after the White House called it a fireable offense.

The irony of the Trump administration calling for someone’s job based on their tweets is not lost on me considering Trump flat out LIED on Obama and wasted tax payer dollars and resources to investigate whether or not Obama wire tapped his private residence in Trump Tower based off a tweet, which has since been revealed as fake news. Dude straight up lied to the American people in order to deflect from his realfireable offenses, but I’ll leave all that to the special prosecutor.

I’m not here to discuss Trump or even irony. This post is about the flood of support Jamele Hill received in the wake of…

Photo credit: The Associated Press

The sentence I hear most from well-meaning, conservative friends since President Trump’s election is this: “We suffered 8 years under Barack Obama.”

Fair enough. Let’s take a look.

The day Obama took office, the Dow closed at 7,949 points. Eight years later, the Dow had almost tripled.

General Motors and Chrysler were on the brink of bankruptcy, with Ford not far behind, and their failure, along with their supply chains, would have meant the loss of millions of jobs. Obama pushed through a controversial, $8o billion bailout to save the car industry. The U.S. car industry survived, started making money again, and the entire $80 billion was paid back, with interest.

While we remain vulnerable to lone-wolf attacks, no foreign terrorist organization has successfully executed a mass attack here since 9/11.

Obama ordered the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.

He drew down the number…