All Things in Moderation

Mitt Romney is looking like a better candidate all the time.

For everyone who ever wondered where the heck some of Superman’s powers came from in Superman II:

Seriously? Super-Kiss? The ability to pull the S off his chest and make it a big cellophane wrapper? And the bad guys “finger beams”? Where are Kryptonian “finger-beams” in the Superman canon?

Susan Solomon chats up stem cells at TED. She brings up Vioxx, a longstanding pharmaceutical bugaboo of mine. Vioxx, for many users, was a miracle drug. For a significant minority of users, it killed them. So, instead of changing the prescription and treatment model, they recalled the drug and took it off the market. Apparently, researching drugs with stem cell cultures could allow us to identify where certain people would be helped and others would die with the use of a drug. That would be a good thing, I would think.

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Is Obesity the Greatest Threat To Our National Security? It’s not a good thing, I know. I’ve recently lost 70 lbs myself, and it’s better being thin than fat, all things considered. But I’m not sure I’ve improved our national security by doing so a single iota. I believe this may be hyperbole.

At least we know the Obama’s aren’t pandering to the fat vote. Although I’m not sure that’s politically smart, given how many of them there are.

Do tax cuts for the rich help the economy? Some say no.

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Is romance and lots of support and loving and no expectation of anything in return? Not according to Athol Kay on his blog (Married Man Sex Life), and not according to his multitudes of readers, and advice seekers, on the forums of said blog. It can be eye opening, yet I’ve found my experience dovetails with much of what I read.

Being a jerk doesn’t necessarily lead to a great marriage, but being nice and sweet and supportive (at least, for the guy) definitely doesn’t lead there, either. If you’re a hyper-supportive beta-male (like me), you might think it’s just your situation, but apparently it’s played out again and again and again in marriages across the world:

Boy meets girl, boy and girl get married, guy is super-supportive and tries to be romantic and sweet, girl loses attraction, sex practically vanishes. Girl tells boy he needs to be more supportive and nicer and possibly richer and also more obedient and then she will find him more attractive. Boy tries to comply, girl becomes more distant, more nagging, more shrewish, less affectionate, sex disappears completely.

Then, if you read the stories, girl, as often as not, takes her love to town, cuckolds her husband, and then when her adultery is finally discovered, blames him and tries to arrange it so she can have her cake and eat it too (exciting lover and poor beta-husband’s wallet). I haven’t exactly experienced that, but it’s pretty clear lots of guys do. Don’t go searching for Talk About Marriage unless you want to be deeply, deeply depressed.

The answer? Guys need to be men, the captains of their ship, and step up to the plate and have some balls. Turns out, neither Oprah nor Doctor Phil, and not even John Gray (although I devoured his stuff in my late 20s, early 30s, with pretty much zero benefit) have the right advice for men. The right advice turns out to be: man up, and don’t put up with bullshit. Who knew?

Don’t even get me started on the Manosphere. They definitely don’t like the womyn much, or our feminized culture.

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I meant to post this yesterday in celebration of ATiM’s anniversary. However, life gets in the way. Since I did not, I get to share this experience:

Coming back from my daughter’s dance class last, I went through a DUI checkpoint that was like nothing I’d ever seen. They randomly picked a stretch of road about a block long, shut off two lanes on either side so all traffic had to be funneled through one lane. There were about 20 officers in the road, about 50 or 60 on the sides, some of them probably technicians or other support people. Along one side there were five or six cruisers with their bars lit, on the other side there were about 25. Going through it, they checked my tags, asked me where I was going, checked my license (checked the cup holders, natch, looking for open containers), and made sure I and my little girl were properly seat-belted.

They were polite as could be, but it was an odd experience. I can’t imagine the open container and seat belt citations could possible pay for a quarter of the expense of such a large operation. There was too much time for seeing the enormity of the stake out and actually getting there for folks not to have plenty of opportunity to put their seat belts on and hide any open containers; they’d have to be actively drunk, and seriously so, to get caught. I heard officers complaining that they’d checked over 40 cars and got nothing. Then I heard another say he saw an open container, but the guy had zoomed on out and gotten away. Nearly 30 cruisers, bars lit, and no one sitting by to chase down a fleeing violator.

Very strange.

Filed under: Bits and Pieces, Mitt Romney | Tagged: Mitt Romney, Superman, Vioxx | 14 Comments »