Stories below the fold

Single mothers in Brazil trying to raise their Zika babies.

Sigh. The problem is one third are not married, and they don't have the extended family in the slums as they did when they lived in villages.

They are Catholic, but few attend church: Often they get their spirituality from folk (pagan) religion.

This pope is emphasizing mercy and pushing the rich into caring for the poor, but not telling the poor things like the importance of marrying the mother of your child and not cheating on her. Indeed, he is busy trying to destroy the Catholic rules that date back to that nasty Jewish carpenter who said divorce is a no no.  Because if you think people should follow the rules that protect the innocent, you are "judgmental".

The Pentecostal solution is having preachers from their own lower class background, not upper class outsiders. These preachers emphasize God loves them, but expects you to actually follow his rules.... they train the men to be faithful, and the church home becomes an extended family to help them out.

Which is why the Catholic church is losing members there.

the west pushes abortion as the way to stop Zika microcephaly, but as the woman in the LATimes story says, she got it late in pregnancy and the ultrasound didn't pick it up. And you don't do abortions at 8 months...the kid will live unless you do a very risky procedure to kill it inside the womb when it is half born.

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Strategypage discusses the changing mess in Syria...

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the heck with the political conventions: ComicCon has the real news: Valerian is coming.

no I am not a follower of the Marvel Universe, but hey, they rule the boxoffice...

and the new Startrek movie is not getting good reviews... personally, I don't like the reboot, except for Scottie. Too many special effects that distract one from the story... and Chris Pine plays Kirk as an immature Kingsman-type smart ass. In the original series, he was Odysseus, the trickster who never had a problem he couldn't figure a way out of, but who did have a serious side.

as for Ghostbusters: I really didn't like the first one, so why bother?

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Did you know that all Chinese college students get mandatory military training? But just summer training, no draft and no long term mandatory service.

And their snowflake students are now complaining about it.

and south China had some bad flooding in Wuhan..

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Freakonomics on gender barriers. Most of it is about the good old days, when real barriers made it hard for us.

Once "feminists" took over in the mid 1970's, the "mean girls" who persecuted us in college for being nerds decided they were "feminists" and took credit for our success, as if the feminist movement in 1975 was the reason I got into medical school a decade earlier.

The real reason for the feminist revolution is actually the pill...

The problem with women having a successful career is children, of course. One barrier back then was asking how we could take care of children when we worked 80 hours a week. Unlike here in the Philippines, the US didn't have extended families to do this, and most could not afford nannies.

I essentially worked "part time" as a doc (i.e. 40 hours a week) when I had kids. Hence the gender pay gap.

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NYTimes essay on the problem when sick people don't have family to feed and house them. link2

where is the extended family in this?

Some are homeless (often from substance abuse), abandoned their spouses or lost them because of promiscuity...

However, remember that 37 million Americans are caretakers for their elderly family members or neighbors. They are often overlooked.

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