Scroll down to get right to today's topic.

What do I focus on today?  There is so much going on this week, I don't know how to proceed.  Unwed pregnant mother taking office with pride in her unwed status.  State fascism on e-Harmony's business.  Islamic piracy on the high seas missing the Islamic tag in all the news report headlines, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.  Christian justification of sexual impurity.  A constitutional crisis being ignored by all forms of media save blogs like mine.  Enough nuclear fuel for Iran's first nuclear bomb.  Robert Spencer discussed his new book today, Stealth Jihad.  Sarkozy Pushes for Abandonment of Dollar as World Reserve Currency.  Michael Jackson former king of pop has converted to Islam. 

I've had this sitting on my browser for more than a day intending to get it online but so much else has needed attending.  This is 23 years old and is still applicable today because the Liberal doctrinistas have not updated their playbook in that length of time.

Thomas Sowell published this Dec, 31, 1985 in National Review: 

An English Primer
A glossary translating political rhetoric into plain English

Crisis:  Any situation you want to change.

Bilingual:  Unable to speak English.

Equal Opportunity:  Preferential Treatment.

Non-Judgmental:  Blaming Society.

Simplistic:  An argument you disagree with but can't answer.

Rehabilitation:  Magic word used before releasing criminals.

Demonstration:  A riot by people you agree with.

Mob Violence:  A riot by people you disagree with.

A Matter of Principal:  A political controversy involving the convictions of Liberals.

An Emotional Issue:  A political controversy involving the convictions of conservatives.

People's Republic:  A place where you do what you are told or get shot.

National Liberation Movements:  Organizations trying to create People's Republics.

Competency:  Competence as described by the incompetent.

Stereotypes:  Behavior patterns you don't want to think about.

Reaganomics:  Media explanation of downturns in the economy.

Robust Economy:  Media explanation of upturns in the economy.

Constitutional Interpretation:  Judges reading their own views into the Constitution.

Politicizing the Courts:  Criticizing judges for reading their own views into the Constitution.

A Proud People:  Chauvinists you like.

Bigots:  Chauvinists you don't like.

Innovation:  Something new.

New Innovation:  Something new by someone who doesn't understand English.

Private Greed:  Making money selling people what they want.

Public Service:  Gaining power to make people do what you want them to.

Moderate Arabs:  Mythical beings to whom State Dept. officials make sacrificial offerings.

Special Interest Lobby:  Politically organized conservatives.

Political Interest Group:  Politically organized Liberals.

Accountability:  Holding teachers, public officials, and private businesses responsible for their misdeeds.

Chilling Effect:  Holding journalists accountable for their misdeeds.

Portable TV.

Now, that's done:  Its times like this that I back up and start looking at happy news.  I really like the topic of happiness.  So much has been written on the topic and a myriad of studies have been done in pursuit of understanding how to achieve it.  Rarely do any of these works have any real valuable input.  As a liberal, the more ignorant I was the happier I was and the more I strove for wisdom the more frustrated I was for the effort.  It wasn't until my world view suffered a seachange when I became a Christian and began studying the Bible that I knew any real wisdom/insight or real control of my happiness level.

Eyetop TV

Today in the NY Times a story was released that I actually agree with.  A side note: Whenever a paper or other news venue does a good job I want to be sure to laud that agency.  I want to encourage good work even among the worst businesses.  It is such a rare event they do a good job that I am able to laud the NY Times I do not want to miss this opportunity.  Well done Roni Caryn Rabin of the NY Times.  I do not have the letters next to my name which give me credibility among the modern Liberal elites.  Therefor I rely on the authority of studies and principled PhD's to gain cred with them.  Not that PhD's knowledge ensure wisdom, they don't.  Nor do studies actually carry any authority of wisdom with me, they don't.  In fact, all studies do is either verify our common sense or they dis-inform.  There may be the rare exception which demonstrates counter-intuitive information, but overall, they are a huge waste of taxpayer money.  For example, just look at the giant federal funding motivated global warming scam and the multitude of dis-information that has produced.  However, the modern Liberal elite place a great deal of value with them, so I'll make use of them where I can.   uh... Pardon my rabbit trail.

TV while you pee.

So now we have a study to prove what I've been saying about the detrimental effect of watching TV and the beneficial effect of going to church and sacrificing some of your time and wealth to benefit others.  YEEHAW!  I'm giddy with excitement.  One more tool in my psychological black bag to whip out in conversation with the victims of the mental illness of political Liberalism.

TV while you flee.

see full article
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/health/research/20happy.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

What Happy People Don’t Do

Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers — but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television, a new study finds.

That’s what unhappy people do.

Although people who describe themselves as happy enjoy watching television, it turns out to be the single activity they engage in less often than unhappy people, said John Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the author of the study, which appeared in the journal Social Indicators Research.

One of the biggest problems with our ability to be happy is the lack of understanding that our happiness is a personal responsibility in two ways.  1st  You cannot rely on outside influences to determine whether or not you are happy, otherwise we would be continually swinging from extreme highs to extreme lows fully dependent on whether we get our way.  This is profound immaturity.  Think of a baby.  If he wants food, he cries and if his desire is not met, he will throw a fit.  If he wants a toy, whatever his desire, he will throw a fit if he does not get his way.  Seemingly, his life's purpose is to make his parents' lives miserable.  2nd We have a responsibility to be happy for the sake of others.  Consider what its like being around a moody person.  Their foul mood is a drag on the effectiveness of our efforts to be happy.  As Dennis Prager is fond of saying, "Your mood is like your breath.  You brush your teeth daily (aside from preventing them from rotting) and use mouthwash and breath mints so others don't have to endure a foul odor as you relate with them."  Similarly, a bad mood is unattractive and encourages others to find somebody with clean, fresh smelling breath to relate with.

We can observe in the people around us that there are many people in terrible circumstances who are happy in spite of those circumstances and there are many people in wonderful circumstances who are miserable in spite of them.  Obviously there are many people in wonderful circumstances who are happy and many people in terrible circumstances who are miserable and obviously we are not completely emotionally independent of our circumstances.  If I am physically or even verbally attacked, my happiness is affected negatively, but in the main, our condition of happiness is a decision rather than a result of circumstances. 

Who hasn't considered winning the lottery and assumed that would make them happy?  Yet the promotional TV program the lotto companies initiated when the lotto was first started here in California to increase their sales was canceled because the follow up stories were depressing.  Case after case of average people were made millionaires overnight and in 6 months or 6 years they were not only broke, but in deep debt and their extended families hated them and all their former friends we estranged from them and in many cases the recipients were in trouble with the law, all because of the money.  We read story after story of rich, famous and successful people committing suicide in their profound misery or overdosing on drugs trying to find some route to happiness that their fame, success and wealth did not accomplish.  So we can conclude that happiness is not determined by our circumstances.  It must be from within.  A happy poor person will be even happier as a rich person.  An unhappy poor person will be even unhappier as a rich person.  Why?  Because they were under the impression that the reason they were unhappy was because they could not have what they wanted.  When they got what they wanted, their joy was short lived until they realized the next thing they wanted but could not have.

click this picture

Given that happiness is from some source within us, we must necessarily assume responsibility for our own happiness.  A road block to happiness is observed in our ignorance of our own inner conditions.  If I have never considered my happiness in a practical way, how do I know if I have reason to be happy or even whether or not I am happy, it is simply a guess and that person who is dependent on the sensation of joy or excitement rather than the evaluation of their well being exists in a powerless constant state of dependence and/or victimhood.  Feeling powerless to control whether or not we're happy adds to the drag on your ability to acheive happiness.

In order to assess our emotional condition, let us first define happiness.  I will start by stating what it isn't.  First, happiness is not being excited.  Most of our youth and many adult

Designing a happy life entails finding purpose for your existence.  Devote your life to a great cause.  A family is a great cause.  You may not want kids when you're 12 or 16 but you certainly will when you reach 20 or 30.  Some adults may not realize this desire well into their 40's, but it will come.  So start planning for that goal as young as is possible for you.  A caveat here:  Natural desires can be overcome.  Some have decided at some point that they will devote their lives to some other great cause in which they find as much self worth and social value.  It is difficult for me to imagine anything which would beat the enriching of life that children bring, but some few people might find teaching or life saving work as fulfilling.  So, you can experience the value and self worth without producing children, but it requires every bit as much sacrifice and investment of time and effort as do children.  The point is, though you are required to expend great amounts of energy and have your patience tested way beyond its limits, value and worth are the rewards for the investment and sacrifice with its inherent risk.  One more thing, you can be devoted to more than one great cause.  It is not impossible to have a family and win championships or invent life saving devices.

Designing a happy life entails maintaining same sex friendships.  A man who has no same sex friendships is a man wrapped up in his own desires.  It is another sign of immaturity.  He is often unable to maintain those relationships because he is closed off, emotionally reclusive and therefore unable to get feedback on his behavior and thought pocesses.  Women, pay attention to this part of a man's makeup.  If a man is unable to demonstrate close relationships with another man, it is a foreboding sign that he is unable to relate to you emotionally or conversely, that he can only relate to the opposite sex.  Either way, his mental health is not sufficient to maintain good intimacy.  The same is true of women.  There are times when a spouse needs to disucss something with someone other than their spouse.  I could not take my struggles with attraction to a female coworker to my wife.  The news would be devastating to her, but the friend, if he is a friend can steer me right.  This is a critical aspect of healthy social constructs.  Obviously, you have to be concerned with the quality of the character of their friends.  Its no good that they are in relationships with people who encourage them to do drugs or alcohol, steal, lie, cheat, or are prone to violent behavior.

Designing a happy life entails expressing grattitude.  This is a topic of which it is difficult to express the importance.  Let's say your dad gives you a fancy car.  You are excited to have your first car and you are grateful to your dad for such a wonderful gift.  However, if he bought you a broken down bucket of bolts and worked with you since your 14th birthday to re-build it from the ground up, after all that work by you and he working together, you know the effort that went into that car and value it much more than the one that came off the showroom floor.  Though he put just as much effort into earning the money that bought the new car, you didn't see it.  All you saw was the shiny new car and a stern "Take care of it!" from him.  Whereas, with the car that was built from the ground sat in the garage for years and you saw his legs sticking out from underneath and you listened to his instruction as he taught you how to put it together.  The car's value has appreciated in your eyes.  Put another way, when you express grattitude, you increase the value of those with whom you have relationship.  You literally build a wealth of emotional value for someone by expressing grattitude to them.

Religion is one of those controversial topics, but in my mind, designing a happy life entails maintaining a relationship with God.  The traditions and social boundaries that religion constructs around an individual on a practical level, provide a structure for creating behavior patterns that promote healthy social relationships with society at large and more importantly, with God.  My personal experience in this relationship is such that I know God exists and has in His grace and mercy toward us, set these boundaries up for both, my personal well being and the well being of all of mankind.  More, He desires to be in relationship with me.  Talk about feeling valued and having worth, when I consider that Jesus the Maker of heaven and earth sacrificed His perfect relationship with the Father for even a moment so I could regain right standing with the Father....  It is in this relationship that I have had one of only two experiences with bliss or a 10 on the happiness scale.  The Bible refers to this experience as "Joy inexpressable." 1st Peter 1:8.  It is accomplished by knowing Him, (studying His Word to us to know what He tells us about Himself) believing in Him, loving Him, submitting to His will, likening yourself to a bride submitted to her husband voluntarily and offering Him the praise He is due.  I delight in His presence, His nearness to me and desire for me.  The word 'worship' is difficult to translate into English, but the concept is to 'kiss toward.'  Essentially, it means to display affection toward God.

I have not yet addressed the issue of overcoming circumstances.  For there are certainly circumstances for which we should grieve.  I could not expect anybody to be eternally at the state of joy unless they never again experienced loss and suffering and continually experienced an improving life.  Just slightly impossible.  Grieving is a necessary part of our mental health.  We don't have to lose a loved one to require grieving either.  The death of a dream would necessitate a grieving process.  So, what is that point where we need to process losses and go through the grief cycle?  I have set my expectations to such a low state that insults are ineffective.  It would take a physical attack or similar to cause me to experience a sense of loss great enough to send me into the cycle of grief processing.  I might have to adjust that setting if the insults become injurious to my reputation, but thus far this is working pretty well.

A caller into the Dennis Prager show related that she had been raped at college and for two years carried a burden of victimhood.  She avoided telling her father of the attack fearing, since he was a Marine, that he'd go kill the attacker.  She was surprised that his fatherly love empowered him to give her this advice.  "Sweetheart, you have a choice.  This can be a fork in the road or this can be a bump in the road."  In other words, you can allow this experience to change your life or you can pick yourself up, dust yourself off and go on living the life you choose.  Armed with that information, she'd chosen to go back to making her own decisions, not based on fear, but based on her knowledge that the possibility for attacks exist and to use common sense, but to live the life that pleased her, to continue on the path she'd been on before the attack.  You may experience bumps in the road, sometimes very serious bumps, bumps big enough to overturn your life, but it is up to you if those bumps change your direction.

I was raised in a very disturbed and turbulent home, so I sought solitude early in life.  I established behavior patterns and learned to enjoy being alone.  With my propensity toward solitude coupled with high expectations of Miss Right, I too have had difficulty establishing long term eros relationships.  I married much later than most and that marriage failed after 3 years partly due to these facts.  So, I can certainly identify with that single mother who authored the article I referred to earlier.  Aside from siblings and nephews and nieces and more distant family and a few close friends, I am perfectly contented, even joyful to live this single life and dedicate it to writing these blogs to pass my experience down to the next generation.  I would have preferred to raise my own kids to teach these things to, but it is my hope some youth read this and take it to heart for the enrichment of their lives to be as full and complete as they can possibly make them.  These are the basics of judging your own well being to make that consistent enrichment, joy and happiness possible.  Welcome to the world of self empowerment.

Summary
To acheive a high, stable level of happiness in no order of importance;

keep expectations low
have a near impossible dream or dreams and strive to acheive them
take or reinitiate a hobby
maintain a life purpose
maintian open and honest friendships
start and regularly update a grattitude journal
know and trust God

Now, go out and use your God given responsibility to judge people by the quality of their character, but not by their appearance.

According to the latest census information calculated by Dr. Warren Farrell who authored a new book on gender discrimination, women are 1350% times more likely to commit suicide after their spouse has died.  In fact there are a number of factoids you should commit to memory for future reference when bills come up to be voted on.  Here are a few of them:

Women's health gets almost no funding while men's health issues are documented and studies are funded by tax dollars. 
Women are blamed for nearly 100% of violence between men and women when the truth is violence is initiated equally by men and women.
Women die on average 10 to 1 earlier than men.
Girls are scoring behind boys in school in every single area of study except science and math. 
Girls represent 90% of the dropout rate in high school.
The graduation rates are typically 44% girls and 56% boys.
Girls are 1 1/2 years behind boys in reading skills, verbal skills, writing skills.
Girls are over 90% of the discipline problems.
Girls are more likely to be diagnosed ADD.
For the last forty years there has been more medical research done on women than on men but that has changed.
There is no women's health department in any of the 50 states.

Are you outraged yet?  No?  Why, have I got my facts wrong?  What's wrong with my facts?  Surely you've noticed at least one or two are not what you've heard.  In truth, I have everyone of these facts exactly, perfectly wrong.  To correct them, all you have to do is swap male for female and vice versa.. 

Now are you outraged?  I have limited the information thus far so I could have you compare the gender bias against men.  Here are some more factoids:

More than 100 studies, most of them done by feminist organizations have observed that women and men initiate domestic violence equally as often.
Men do not report their injuries or make hospital visits almost to a man if they were obtained through the violence of their spouse.
Men die of 14 of the 15 leading causes of death earlier than women.
The excuse for ignoring this disparity is because they say that men induce their own problems.
Men over 85 are 1,350% more likely to commit suicide than women over 85 when their spouse has died.
Men over 85 are 10 times more likely to die than women over 85 if their spouse divorces them or leaves.

We have to understand that every society in history that has survived has trained their boys to be dispensable.  Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men?  is the book Dr. Warren Farrell authored in debate with another scientist.
Marriage Divorce and Child Custody.  During the major successes of the feminist movement, women were saying that men do not have any more right to jobs than do women.  At the same time, when it came to divorce and child custody they were saying that women should have the right to decide who will retain custody of the children.  Okay, so the issue isn't what's right for women or men.  The issue is what's best for the child.  Well, hold on to your hats.  Dr. Farrell did research which led to the book, Father and Child Reunion, and found that what's best for children is for both parents to be equally involved in the child's life in a way that doesn't force the child to leave friends and neighborhood to do time with the other parent and that there is no bad mouthing from mom to dad or dad to mom.  Barring the perfect arrangement, he found that in many national databases recording the conditions of parent/child relationships and the consequential outcomes of their children, the children of single dads do better than children of single moms from about 20 of 26 measures and about equal in another five measures.  It comes down to the boundary enforcement that dads do that really benefit children socially, academically, psychologically, and actually having better physical health as well. 

Loving emotion is important, nobody denies that, but the feminization of our culture has resulted in the harm of our culture.  The elimination of boundaries and the softening of rules has done more to sicken our culture than any amount of spinning can cover.  Assuming that women are the ones who know better what is good for the child or that they are even willing or able to make this the sole reason for their consideration in the height of a divorce is profoundly foolish.  Yet this is exactly what the judges, sociologists, and society in general have done.  Suppose for a moment, sociologists, judges and society at large said of the medical profession, "We have to give doctors the option of whether women should be allowed to practice medicine."  After all, doctors are the ones who would know.  Doesn't work very well for the ethics of professionalism, why should it work for the ethics of parenting?

I am not a parent, but I watched my brother go through this discrimination and literally lose his child because his mother insisted on moving half way across the country.  Granted, my brother was no joy to have as an ex-husband, but discrimination is discrimination.  And men are suffering far more of it these days than are women.  My nephew is now an adult making his own way through life, but I've learned through discussions with my brother that they both regret missing much of their relationship.  (From about 7 years old except summer visits for a few weeks.)  Thank God the boy had a steady man to demonstrate boundaries and discipline so he is a capable, even successful young man entering the police services, but what could have been was entirely taken out of my brother's hands.