Archive for March 25th, 2015
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Perfect Responses for Why They Don’t Have Kid
In a classic Seinfeld episode, Elaine sits surrounded by friends with kids as they accost her with the now-infamous line: “You gotta have a baby!” We can only guess millions of women watched, nodding their heads and wondering: What do you say when society demands to know when you’ll procreate, and why you haven’t done so yet?
Even as more millennials choose to delay children or remain child-free altogether, the demand on women to have babies is still high.
Media has doubled down on celebrity “baby bump” coverage, and young women report feeling real pressure thanks to society’s strong link between femininity and motherhood.
Many women indeed long for children, while others are firmly against it and still more are undecided.
But regardless of a woman’s feelings on childbearing, the decision to have kids is hers alone, to be decided for her own reasons. And no woman should have to submit to society’s relentless questioning on the matter.
Here are 12 women who had the perfect responses to the dreaded baby questions.
1. Cameron Diaz: “I have an unbelievable life.”
In a 2009 interview with Parade magazine, Diaz admitted what many child-free women already know: Children aren’t necessarily the key to a fulfilling existence.
2. Jennifer Westfeldt: “Regret … doesn’t seem like a compelling enough reason.”
It’s only natural, when surrounded by a sea of happy mothers, for the fear of regret to creep in. But actress and director Jennifer Westfeldt, longtime partner to Jon Hamm, told the New York Times in 2012 that she doesn’t let the “what if’s” change her decision.
3. Zooey Deschanel: “Nobody asks a guy that.”
Deschanel, who is currently pregnant, reminded everyone that asking about a woman’s child-free status doesn’t become more acceptable if the woman actually wants kids.
The actress told InStyle magazine in 2014 how annoying it was to be constantly questioned about babies before she had them — a practice, she noted, that’s inherently rooted in sexism.
4. Marisa Tomei: “I don’t know why women need to have children to be seen as complete human beings.”
If a woman doesn’t have kids, has she really fulfilled her true potential? Some people truly believe the answer is “no.” But Marisa Tomei questioned that cliché in an interview with Manhattan magazine in 2009.
5. Chelsea Handler: “Childhood was heartbreaking enough.”
Handler, who’s spoken openly about having an abortion at age 16, admitted on The Conversation With Amanda de Cadenet in 2013 that not only does she not believe she’d be a good mother, but that she doesn’t have any desire to experience childhood again. It’s a raw but honest confession that we don’t often hear from women.
6. Oprah Winfrey: “If I had kids, my kids would hate me.”
In a world where women often feel forced to choose between having children and having a career, Winfrey has always been open about her desire to prioritize her work.
She told the Hollywood Reporter in 2013 that while her best friend, Gayle King, dreamed of motherhood, she dreamed of becoming Martin Luther King Jr. – and she realizes that children would have ended up taking second place in her life.
7. Ellen DeGeneres: “I wouldn’t want to screw them up.”
There’s a reason why parenting is called the hardest job in the world, and DeGeneres and wife Portia de Rossi admit they don’t actively want to take on the task. “You have to really want to have kids, and neither of us did,” de Rossi said to Out in 2013.
DeGeneres echoed her sentiments in an essay penned for People magazine in 2014, reminding readers that many child-free couples weigh the pros and cons of parenting just as much, if not more so, than many parents themselves.
8. Margaret Cho: “I ovulate sand.”
While there’s little research into why some women may not feel a biological drive to reproduce or lack a strong maternal instinct, there is certainly anecdotal evidence that such women aren’t as rare as we might think. Firmly in that camp is Margaret Cho, who quipped in her 2003 film Revolution that she’s more interested in adopting a 50-year-old “baby by choice” than having an actual child.
9. Sarah Silverman: “I want to have kids when there’s nothing else I want more.”
As Silverman’s comments to the Daily Beast in 2010 remind us, there’s no age limit on being a parent. Silverman has additional reasons for not wanting children right now (fear of passing on her depression being one of them), but her point about not rushing if you don’t need to is a much-needed perspective.
10. Kim Cattrall: “I have a headache.”
Here’s the truth: Kids can be exhausting. Kim Cattrall told the Advocate in 2008 what most parents already know (but likely don’t want to think about too much).
11. Jennifer Aniston: “No one has the right to assume.”
Aniston has spent her career facing down a barrage of gossip about her personal life, from her divorce from Brad Pitt to (perhaps most frequently) her childless status. She’s fired back again and again, including a 2014 interview with Allure magazine in which she reminded naysayers of a basic fact: The reasons why a woman doesn’t have kids are no one’s damn business.
12. Gloria Steinem: “Everybody does not have to live in the same way.”
After a difficult childhood spent tending to her mentally ill mother, Steinem said she didn’t want to spend any more time caring for others. And, as she told an audience in India, she hasn’t regretted it “for a millisecond.” In a conversation with Jennifer Aniston at the MAKERS Conference in 2014, she stated that the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s showed her that being married with kids is not the only way to live, a point she reiterated on Chelsea Lately in 2011 with an unforgettable quote.
At long last, Pentagon Admitted That Israel Has Nuclear Weapons
—“Critical Technological Assessment in Israel and NATO Nations”—
It’s not exactly news.
According to opinion polls, two-thirds of the American people, know this facts.
Many articles and documentaries have expounded on this fact: That Israel possessed Nuclear bombs since the late 1960’s, thanks to France total participation in providing Israel with nuclear capabilities.
France even tested an Israeli bomb in Algeria desert and scores of Algerian and French soldiers were not informed of the terrible consequences of this live test.
Could this be true?
While the Washington press corps were obsessed over Hillary Clinton’s e-mails at the State Department, reporters were missing a far more important story about government secrets. After 5 decades of pretending otherwise, the Pentagon has reluctantly confirmed that Israel does indeed possess nuclear bombs, as well as awesome weapons technology similar to America’s.
Early last month the Department of Defense released a secret report done in 1987 by the Pentagon-funded Institute for Defense Analysis that essentially confirms the existence of Israel’s nukes.
DOD was responding to a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by Grant Smith, an investigative reporter and author who heads the Institute for Research: Middle East Policy.
Smith said he thinks this is the first time the US government has ever provided official recognition of the long-standing reality.
It’s not exactly news.
Policy elites and every president from LBJ to Obama have known that Israel has the bomb.
But American authorities have cooperated in the secrecy and prohibited federal employees from sharing the truth with the people.
When the White House reporter Helen Thomas asked the question of Barack Obama back in 2009, the president ducked. “With respect to nuclear weapons, you know, I don’t want to speculate,” Obama said. That was an awkward fib. Obama certainly knows better, and so do nearly two-thirds of the American people, according to opinion polls.
In my previous blog, “What about Israel’s Nuclear Bomb?” I observed that the news media focused solely on Iran’s nuclear ambitions but generally failed to note that Israel already had nukes.
That produced a tip about the Pentagon release in early February.
Yet the confirmation of this poorly kept secret opens a troublesome can of worms for both the US government and our closest ally in the Middle East.
Official acknowledgement poses questions and contradictions that cry out for closer inspection.
For many years, the United States collaborated with Israel’s development of critical technology needed for advanced armaments. Yet Washington pushed other nations to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which requires international inspections to discourage the spread of nuclear arms.
Israel has never signed the NPT and therefore does not have to submit to inspections.
Washington knew all along what the inspectors would find in Israel. Furthermore, as far back as the 1960s, the US Foreign Assistance Act was amended by concerned senators to prohibit any foreign aid for countries developing their own nukes.
Smith asserts that the exception made for Israel was a violation of the US law but it was shrouded by the official secrecy. Since Israel is a major recipient of US aid, American presidents had good reason not to reveal the truth.
The newly released report—“Critical Technological Assessment in Israel and NATO Nations”—describes Israel’s nuclear infrastructure in broad terms, but the dimensions are awesome.
Israel’s nuclear research labs, the IDA researchers reported, “are equivalent to our Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories.” Indeed, the investigators observed that Israel’s facilities are “an almost exact parallel of the capability currently existing at our National Laboratories.”
The IDA team visited Israeli labs, factories, private companies and government research centers in Israel and relevant NATO nations (details on NATO allies were redacted from the released version).
On Israel, the tone of the report was both admiring and collegial. “The SOREQ center,” it said, for instance, “runs the full nuclear gamut of activities from engineering, administration and non-destructive testing for electro-optics, pulsed power, process engineering and chemistry and nuclear research and safety. This is the technology base required for nuclear weapons design and fabrication.”
The IDA team added: “It should be noted that the Israelis are developing the kind of codes which will enable them to make hydrogen bombs. That is, codes which detail fission and fusion processes on a microscopic and macroscopic level.” So far, The IDA estimated, Israel scientists were about where the US had been in the 1950s in understanding fission and fusion processes.
The report does not include a single declarative sentence that directly states the taboo—Israel has nukes—but the meaning is obvious.
For many years, scholars and other experts have estimated that Israel has at least 100 to 200 bombs, possibly more.
Some of the IDA’s observations seem to hint at a copy-cat process in which the US government either actively helped or at least looked the other way while Israel borrowed or purloined technologies to establish a parallel nuclear system that looks a lot like America’s.
The IDA document does not say anything, one way or the other, on the history of how this happened. But critics of Israel and advocates for banning all nuclear weapons have harbored suspicions for decades.
The Institute for Research: Middle East Policy, Smith said, is pushing another FOIA request aimed at the CIA, hoping to pry open long-secret intelligence investigations about how Israel managed to get the bomb in the first place.
The institute is seeking disclosure of a CIA study that supposedly investigated how quantities of uranium were leaked or allegedly smuggled by Israeli agents from a Pennsylvania defense plant to provide seed corn for the Israel bomb.
Smith and others suspect that elements of the US government knew what happened back then or may even have assisted the stealthy transfer. That particular mystery was a hot issue back in the 1970s. It seems likely to get renewed interest now that the pretense of official ignorance has been demolished by release of the 1987 report.
However, the IDA’s most powerful message may not be what it says about Israel’s nukes but what it conveys about the US-Israel relationship.
It resembles a technological marriage that over decades transformed the nature of modern warfare in numerous ways. The bulk of the report is really a detailed survey of Israel’s collaborative role in developing critical technologies—the research and industrial base that helped generate advanced armaments of all sorts. Most Americans, myself included, are used to assuming the US military-industrial complex invents and perfects the dazzling innovations, then shares some with favored allies like Israel.
That’s not altogether wrong but the IDA report suggests a more meaningful understanding. The US and Israel are more like a very sophisticated high-tech partnership that collaborates on the frontiers of physics and other sciences in order to yield the gee-whiz weaponry that now define modern warfare. Back in the 1980s, the two nations were sharing and cross-pollinating their defense research at a very advanced level.
Today we have as a result the “electronic battlefield” and many other awesome innovations. Tank commanders with small-screen maps that show where their adversaries are moving. Jet pilots who fire computer-guided bombs. Ships at sea that launch missiles over the horizon and hit targets 1,000 miles away.
I had to read the report several times before I grasped its deeper meaning. The language is densely technological and probably beyond anyone (like myself) who is not a physicist or engineer. The researchers reported on the state of play in electronic optical systems, plasma physics, laser-guided spacecraft, obscure communication innovations and many other scientific explorations that were underway circa 1987.
Finally, it dawned on me. These experts were talking in the 1980s about technological challenges that were forerunners to the dazzling innovations that are now standard. I saw some of these new war-fighting devices in the late 1990s when I wrote a short book on the post-Cold War military struggling to redefine itself when it no longer had the Soviet Union as an enemy (Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequence of Peace).
While reporting on numerous military bases—land, sea and air—I saw some of the early attempts at battlefield communications and guidance systems. A lot of the new stuff didn’t work very well. Soldiers and commanders sometimes had to put it aside or work around it. Drones at that stage were still on the drawing boards, known as UAV’s—“unmanned aerial vehicles.”
The Middle East wars became the live-fire testing ground where new systems were perfected. The consequences of peace were brushed aside by the terror of 9-11. War became America’s continuous preoccupation.
Israel participated importantly in developing groundwork for some of the wonder weapons and, as the IDA survey makes clear, Israeli physicists or engineers were sometimes a few steps ahead of their American counterparts. To be sure, the Israelis were junior partners who brought “technology based on extrapolations of US equipment and ideas.” But the report also observed: “Much Israeli fielded electronic warfare and communications [is] ahead of US fielded equipment.”
On several occasions, the research team spoke of “ingenious” or “Ingeniously clever” solutions that Israeli technologists have found for mind-bending problems of advanced physics. The IDA team also suggested opportunities for American researchers to piggy-back on what Israel had discovered or to team up with one of their R&D centers. Yale’s Office of Naval Research, IDA suggested, should collaborate with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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“Scientists at RAFAEL [another Israeli center] have come up with an ingenious way of using the properties of a glow discharge plasma to detect microwave and millimeter waves,” the report said. “The attractiveness of the project lies in the ability of the discharge to withstand nuclear weapons effects.”
This observation gave a me a chill because the earnest defense scientists have yet to find a way for human beings “to withstand nuclear weapons effects.”
It would be good to keep in mind that these extraordinary breakthroughs in technology have one purpose—fighting wars—and are intended to give still greater advantage to advanced nations like the US and Israel that dwarf more primitive adversaries. Many of the new technologies, it is true, will find commercial applications that improve everyday lives (some already have). Yet it is also true that our advances in high-tech killing power have not subdued all the enemies.
They find irregular ways to fight back. They blow the legs off our soldiers. They plant home-made bombs in crowded restaurants. They recruit children to serve as their guided missiles. They capture and slaughter innocent bystanders, while our side merely bombs the villages from high altitude. The victims do not see our way as pristine or preferable. Their suffering becomes their global recruiting.
The highly successful partnership of American and Israeli military science is one more reason it will be most difficult to disentangle from the past and turn the two countries in new directions, either together or separately. But many people are beginning to grasp that lopsided wars—contests between high-tech and primitive forms of destruction—do not necessarily lead to victory or peace. They have led the United States into more wars.
Read Next: William Greider on how Israel’s nuclear superiority affects Middle East conflicts
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