Btw....Alzheimer is not a women's disease either...

Found via Jerry's blog, here is the pdf:

More women than men have Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. Almost two-thirds of all Americans living with Alzheimer’s are women. Of the 5.2 million people over age 65 with Alzheimer’s in the United States, 3.4 million are women and 1.8 million are men. Based on estimates from ADAMS, 16 percent of women aged 71 and older have Alzheimer’s disease or other dementia compared with 11 percent of men.

Further analyses show that the larger proportion of older women than men who have Alzheimer’s disease or other dementia is primarily explained by the fact that women live longer on average than men. Moreover, many studies of the age-specific incidence (development of new cases) of Alzheimer’s disease or any dementia have found no significant difference by gender. Thus, women are not more likely than men to develop dementia at any given age.

Men just die earlier.

Circumcision to reduce HIV in Africa....well maybe not that good idea

We talked about it here before. It seems some of the worries here are becoming true:

Male circumcision is becoming a canal for new HIV infections as men are now reluctant to use condoms on the basis that they are 60 percent safe, a government official has said. [...] “We have a huge challenge where male circumcision has created a canal to those who do not want to use condoms. [...] According to Khumalo, Sub-Sahara Africa still records the highest figures of new infections with about 7 000 estimated infections despite the increase in the numbers of men who are getting circumcised.

*Sigh*

Besides that there is a lot going on with circumcision:

More than 40 000 Zimbabwean adult men, according to reports, have been circumcised since the programme began in 2010 and 100 000 more are expected to undergo circumcision by the end of 2012.

Zimbabwe has set a goal of circumcising 1,2 million men by 2015.

Sinokuthemba Xaba, Zimbabwe’s national male circumcision co-ordinator told the state media that approximately 11 000 men were circumcised by December 2010, with over 20 000 having been circumcised this year alone.

He said preparations were under way for the launch of a neo-natal circumcision programme, where the medical procedure will be performed free of charge on male babies as soon as they are born.

In August, government started an ambitious programme aimed at male cabinet ministers, MPs and councilors to undergo circumcision.

Oh my....

Recent DV data from the CDC Survey

I didn't really look at the DV data in the recent CDC study. Luckily someone else did. God, I am lazy. Via Glenn Sacks:

within the past year, 6.5% of men and 6.3% of women said they were victims of violence at the hands of an intimate partner. Another 18% of men and only 14% of women reported themselves the victims of “psychological aggression.” And when it came to being a victim of “coercive control” by an intimate partner, males outnumbered females by almost a 3:2 margin, 15.2% to 10.7%.

That last is significant of course because the entire DV industry has for years told us that DV is all about power and control. So isn’t it interesting that women do that far more than do men.

When it comes to lifetime violence (as defined by the survey), women do indeed report greater victimization, but the gap between men and women isn’t great. For example, lifetime figures for physical violence victimization by an intimate partner are 32.9% for women and 28.2% for men.

U.S. Census Child Support Figures

Via Glenn Sacks:

While we’re on the subject, it’s worth noting that the U.S. Census Bureau came out with the latest child support figures earlier this month. The most recent data here are for 2009.

The good news is that the number of custody orders with dads as the custodial parent has rocketed skyward. In 2007, they were only 16.2% of the total; in 2009 17.8% of parents with custody orders were dads. At that rate it’ll only be 20 years before we reach equality in child custody. Break out the champagne.

What’s also true is that, even though they’re ordered to pay more than mothers, fathers do a lot better job of doing so. Fathers are ordered to pay, on average, $5,997 per year whereas mothers are only ordered to pay $5,601. Despite being ordered to pay more, fathers pay 62.8% of the ordered amount while mothers pay 54.6%. And 42% of custodial mothers receive all of what they’re owed, while only 34.1% of fathers do.

Rule 34 explains

It is a novelity account from reddit about rule34 (if it exists, there is porn of it). Pretty interesting:

On the surface, Rule 34 seems like a hilarious idea; if it exists, there is porn of it. The humor lies in the shock and surreality of the moment for the average user stumbling upon the pornographic interpretation of an idea held dear.

And while I agree that it often times can be funny, the truth is that most of these are not being created as a joke. If Rule 34 really was just an anti-authoritarian 'rebel yell' of the internet, it would have passed into obscurity long ago. But we can see that it has been consistently happening since the dawn of the world wide web, and even longer before. Truth be told, the only difference between today and a few centuries ago is the means of distribution.

It's human nature to sexualize. For every conceivable person, concept, object or emotion there has been at least one person who got off thinking about it. There is no shame in that either; for we are merely prisms, refracting the energies of biology and evolutionary drive into a rainbow spectrum of sexuality. Yet despite the rich diversity of what is capable, we may sometimes feel forced to see the world, and even ourselves, through the colored lenses of a chosen few. This is no way to live your life. You will not feel whole without being at peace with your sexual identity, and you will not be able to love your fellow peoples as deeply without being able to truly see them.

Yes, that above is a picture of Donnie Darko kissing Frank the Rabbit, and it exists because someone out there truly enjoys the sentiment of the idea. Someone out there was moved by the characters, and so took it upon themselves to create from nothing, a way to express their desires and ultimately themselves. It is this form of expression that will ultimately reach across the spans of the internet to touch the soul of someone, somewhere who needs it the most. They may be an avid masturbator, comfortable and experienced with their wants and their body, or they may be in the midst of a sexual awakening, alone and terrified of the implications of their desires. Either way, this art form will for one brief moment allow them a shared connection and reminder that they are not alone.

tl;dr You wonder what the people that draw these are like, and I tell you they are no different from anyone else.

More on the ugliness penalty for men

I already blogged about this, apparently there is more:

A team at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg in northern Germany questioned more than 3,000 people about their career, and compared this with rankings of how attractive they were.

The results suggest that being one point more attractive was worth a three percent wage hike, while being five points more attractive boosted a career by the same amount as having a university degree.

Professor Christian Pfeifer said his study, published this week in the Applied Economics Letters journal, also showed that the importance of looks in the workplace was even more important for men than it was for women.

Act surprised people. Found via Typhonblue on Reddit. Thanks.

Men's health covers

God, I need those abs....

(Not really, it is just cosmo for men)