"How to Accept Anxious Feelings So You Can Let Them Pass"

"I remembered what I’d heard a yoga teacher say once in an uncomfortable pose where the students had their hands above their heads for a long time.

“Just tell your mind that things are going to be like this for the rest of your life. It’ll get bored of the pain and move on.”

I took that idea and started applying it whenever worries came up. I managed to convince myself that I didn’t need to fix anything and that feelings of anxiety were just really not that interesting. It worked out pretty well, so well in fact, that I thought I’d go into a little bit more detail of how I managed to do so and share it with you.

Here are five ways you can begin to accept anxious feelings and live a better life."

https://tinybuddha.com/blog/how-to-accept-anxious-feelings-so-you-can-let-them-pass/

FB: "Often anxiety is so painful that we become fascinated, obsessed even, with understanding and solving our worries. We want to get rid of the pain of anxiety as soon as possible.

Sometimes this is useful, as we come up with strategies to manage our emotions, but a lot of the time it validates the power of our anxiety and adds fuel to the fire. The mind will only focus on what it values; if you can manage to become bored with your anxiety, it will loosen its grip on your life."

"The Abuse Epidemic Hiding in Idyllic French Towns Is Flat-Out Frightening"

"My own country is almost an uncharted territory for me as a reporter. I have often travelled outside of France to report on the plight of being a woman in other countries. In Albania, I met women who had been forced to have an abortion because they were pregnant with girls (it’s called selective abortion). I also went to the Middle East to find out exactly what it's like to be a woman in the Islamic State of Iraq and conducted some interviews in Turkey regarding femicide. There, I learned that assassinations of women are most common after a separation or after asking for a divorce. So when I got back home, I started to collect newspaper clippings that reported on these kinds of incidents in France and realized that sadly, it’s almost just as common in my own country. That’s how I found myself aboard that bus... 

Géraldine is one of the 123 women who was killed by their husband or ex-husband in 2016. The State only started to keep records for these violent deaths from 2006, from which point, at least 153 women had been killed by their partner or ex-partner. The violence that existed before the murder, and the consequential effects it has on the victims’ families is never reported. Sometimes, journalists even write about these stories in a very blasé manner. The feminist blogger, Sophie Gourion has listed them on her Tumblr account under the title “Words kill," for example, “Pissed off in Paris: Partner kills wife and throws her in the trash," could be found on Le Parisien’s website this summer. In May, the magazine 20 Minutes published a story titled, “Morbihan: Drunk Man Throws Wife Overboard.”

https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/charity/a19157642/abuse-epidemic-french-towns/?src=ign_ai&mg=mar&dom=fb

FB: "People also say: “Laurène, this ain’t Bagdad!” But, considering it’s always worse elsewhere is a cowardly way out. Each year in Simone de Beauvoir’s country, 218,000 women are victims of sexual and/or physical violence from their (ex-) partner." 

"Mothers who regret having children are speaking up like never before"

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"what we’re learning about regretful mothers upends binary thinking that women who regret having children must be neglectful or substandard parents: it’s motherhood these women regret, not the children. Dutton expressed love for her offspring (“I would cut off my arm if either needed it”); it was maternal strictures she bristled against (“I felt oppressed by my constant responsibility for them”). In Today’s Parent, Augustine Brown called her children “the best things I have ever done” and assured readers she wasn’t “a monster” before expressing conflicted feelings: “What I’m struggling with is that it feels like their amazing life comes at the expense of my own,” she wrote, expressing remorse for “this life I wanted so badly and now find myself trapped in.”

Feeling trapped or suffocated is a common theme in Donath’s work; mothers felt “as if the metaphorical umbilical cord binding them to their children were in fact wrapped around their neck.” Many women said they felt pressured to have children. So did German novelist Sarah Fischer, author of Die Mutterglück-Lüge (The Myth of Mothering Joy: Regretting Motherhood—Why I’d Rather Have Become a Father), published in 2016, who writes she knew she’d made a mistake “when the contractions started.”

The premise that motherhood is not a one-size-fits-all role shouldn’t come as a surprise in 2018, given the rise of the “childless by choice” movement or an international decline in birth rates. Still, it’s received as an affront to the “sanctity” of motherhood and the entrenched belief that the maternal instinct is innate and unconditional—despite ample historical evidence to the contrary."

http://www.macleans.ca/regretful-mothers/

FB:" There’s an inherent paradox, Donath points out: Women are told they instinctively possess the tools to mother well while constantly being told how to conduct relationships with their children to be “good women” and “good mothers.” And that has come to mean child before all, as seen when author Ayelet Waldman famously received hate mail after stating in the New York Times in 2005 that she loved her husband more than her children; she parlayed the outrage into a 2012 book, Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace. The belief that women are uniquely equipped to parent also marginalizes fathers: author Rahna Reiko Rizzuto was publicly shamed when she revealed she preferred not to be a full-time parent in her memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning. Now a non-custodial mother to two young sons, she has reported being “threatened with death and sexual violence by strangers.”"

"Can Wikipedia Solve YouTube's Conspiracy Theory Problem?"

"It's concerning that YouTube, a company that generates billions of dollars of revenue a year, decided to outsource one of its biggest problems to a nonprofit organization, but research shows that Wikipedia does have a good method for combating hoaxes and conspiracy theories. It's not a solution, but If implemented properly, Wikipedia could at least provide people who watch videos about the Earth being flat with links to better, factual information... 

With YouTube essentially springing this announcement on Wikipedia’s cadre of volunteer editors and community members, it’s also worth questioning whether Wikipedia is ready for what could come next: Trolls and conspiracy theorists flooding the platform to try to influence what’s displayed on YouTube."

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gy8zdm/wikipedia-youtube-conspiracy-theories

Related: Wikipedia and science literacy, another one... 

"The Population Bomb Has Been Defused"

"The total fertility rate is just an estimate, based on the number of children women have been having. When the rate is lower than about 2.1, it means total population will eventually stabilize and decline.

The world is now approaching that magic level, thanks to a phenomenon known as the fertility transition. In most countries, total fertility falls from a high level of about six or seven children to two or below, and stays there. Once smaller families become the norm in a country or region, they very rarely go back up. There are a number of theories for why this happens. The shift from agriculture to urban life means less incentive for families to have kids to work on farms. Urban life also increases the cost of raising a kid. Higher education levels for women, freeing them from traditional gender norms, are probably a big factor as well. Importantly, none of these factors are temporary."

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-16/decline-in-world-fertility-rates-lowers-risks-of-mass-starvation

"After Thousands of Years, Western Science Is Slowly Catching Up to Indigenous Knowledge"

"While new to Western science, the behaviors of the nighthawks have long been known to the Alawa, MalakMalak, Jawoyn, and other Indigenous peoples of northern Australia whose ancestors occupied their lands for tens of thousands of years. Contrary to most scientific studies, Bonta and Gosford’s team foregrounded their research in traditional Indigenous ecological knowledge. They also note that local awareness of the behavior of the firehawks is ingrained within some of their ceremonial practices, beliefs, and creation accounts.

The worldwide attention given to the firehawks article provides an opportunity to explore the double standard that exists concerning the acceptance of Traditional Knowledge by practitioners of Western science... 

Despite the wide acknowledgement of their demonstrated value, many scientists continue to have had an uneasy alliance with TK and Indigenous oral histories. On the one hand, TK and other types of local knowledge are valued when they support or supplements archaeological, or other scientific evidence.

However, when the situation is reversed—when Traditional Knowledge is seen to challenge scientific “truths”—then its utility is questioned or dismissed as myth. Science is promoted as objective, quantifiable, and the foundation for “real” knowledge creation or evaluation while TK may be seen as anecdotal, imprecise, and unfamiliar in form."

http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/after-thousands-of-years-western-science-is-slowly-catching-up-to-indigenous-knowledge-20180226

FB: "Are Indigenous and Western systems of knowledge categorically antithetical? Or do they offer multiple points of entry into knowledge of the world, past and present? In many cases, science and history are catching up with what Indigenous peoples have long known."

"How Raspberries Turned Blue"

"How Raspberries Turned Blue" 

"After five years, the FDA finally caved under pressure from consumer advocates and banned Red No. 2, and the ensuing PR shitstorm against red food dye was so pervasive that Mars Inc. completely eliminated red M&Ms from its mix even though they’d never used Red No. 2. It was a decade before Mars deemed the red threat sufficiently over and red M&Ms came back into rotation in 1987.

Cherry, strawberry, and even watermelon safely secured their spots in the lineup of red or reddish flavors with the addition of Allura Red AC (aka Red 40, introduced in 1971), leaving sanguine raspberry as odd flavor out. The only other red colorant that approximated raspberry’s depth or vibrancy was Red No. 10 (carmoisine, also known as azorubine), but even that had been outlawed in the 1960s. And because colorants are typically altered by changes in temperature and acidity, as well as exposure to light, swapping out an old red for a new one isn’t always a straightforward solution.

Fortunately, raspberry had a wild relative on its side, a country cousin, Rubus leucodermis. Street name: Blue Raspberry, a rangy bramble native to the Pacific Northwest... 

soon came a jarring array of products with blue raspberry flavor: Jic Jac soda, Pop-Tarts, Peeps, the creme in a very special Twinkie. There’s blue raspberry weight gain powder for getting swole, and to the opposite but strangely appropriate end, an entire range of blue raspberry vape juice."

https://www.tastecooking.com/raspberries-turned-blue/?ref=PRH17564EA86B&utm_source=Crown&utm_medium=Advertising&utm_campaign=Taste_Keywee&kwp_0=717300&kwp_4=2535000&kwp_1=1074341

FB: "as the fear over red dye continued, candy companies began to replace it increasingly with Brilliant Blue FCF (also known as Blue #1 Lake), a food dye that’s been in rotation since 1929 in a range of other foods and drinks that had no business being blue: orange-flavored curaçao, Nehi and Frostie brands of cream soda, and Jones bubblegum soda. Giving the flavor a new color allowed it to drop its carcinogenic affiliation and change its image altogether."