Are stay-at-home mothers selfish for regretting their careers?

As a stay-at-home mother for the last six years, I've come a long way in my views on the working vs. homemaker "mommy wars". When I quit my job and started my homemaker journey after the birth of my first daughter, I wanted to be the ideal mother who sacrifices herself for her family. I had come to believe that this was God's will for me as a woman and a mother. My not-so-subtle prejudice was that working moms of young children are being selfish and failing their kids.

I was hardly unusual in my beliefs. While not many women choose to stay home anymore, negative opinions of working moms are still widespread in our society. Despite the gains made by women in the workforce since the 1970s, American society remains very ambivalent about whether mothers should be working at all.

But now that I've been home for the last few years, I've learned the hard way that there are heavy costs associated with completely abandoning one's career in order to stay home. Looking back, I was not quite aware of how these costs would make themselves felt in my own life.

Many of these costs were discussed recently by stay-at-home mother Lisa Endlich Heffernan, in a column where she broke the unspoken solidarity on her side of the 'mommy wars' by publishing a list of regrets about staying home with her children.

Book review: 14 Jewish children who survived World War II

Visit the book's website.

I just finished reading Hidden Like Anne Frank: 14 True Stories of Survival by Marcel Prins, Peter Henk Steenhuis et al. (Arthur A. Levine Books, 2014).

This book is an incredible document, containing the personal memoirs of 14 Jewish men and women who were children in the Netherlands during the war. Each of them survived by going into hiding, and their gripping tales have much to teach us even today.

I have heard it said that individual people can't make much difference in stopping great evil. But in Hidden, it is evident that even small actions and choices by individuals can mean the difference between life and death for others. Consider for instance, Rose-Mary Kahn's story about her father's escape from Westerbork, the Nazi transit camp in Holland:

My father waited until the new moon, so that it would be really dark. Then he made his escape, as arranged, before the evning roll call, and ran to the agreed hiding place. As he was waiting for the foodwaste man, a patrol of Germans and military police came past. 
One of the military policemen saw my father lying there. They looked each other straight in the eye, but the man didn't say a word.

This policeman saved the father's life, simply by choosing to remain silent. His inaction busts one of the great excuses that was used by Nazis and collaborators after the war: the lie that "I was only doing my job".

Farewell Sun News - Canadian conservative media takes a big hit

Conservative news media in Canada has just lost its biggest player. Sun News, Canada's only right-of-centre national news network, suddenly went off the air yesterday morning.

The decision was made by the station's owner, Quebeccor, since it failed to find a buyer for Sun News after months of trying. Quebecor is selling the Sun Media newspapers and websites to Postmedia Network Canada Corp, but Sun News was never part of the deal, so a new owner was required to keep the station operational. No such owner could be found.

It's almost surreal how quickly a complete wipe-out of the network has happened. Not only did their television channel go silent without warning, but their entire website has disappeared as well. Overnight, it's almost like Sun News never existed.

ISIS fighters in Iraq are shaming themselves, not women

Angelina Jolie just came back from a visit to Iraq and wrote a moving op-ed about her visit, urging for more action and resources to help the Iraqi and Syrian refugees who are stuck in dire conditions. 

The stories that Jolie shares about her meetings with refugees have two common themes. Many refugees have had family members killed, and many have had female family members - even young girls - stolen by the militants to be used as sex slaves. Some of the women and girls in the refugee camp have themselves been raped by the militants. In Jolie's words:

What do you say to a mother with tears streaming down her face who says her daughter is in the hands of the Islamic State, or ISIS, and that she wishes she were there, too? Even if she had to be raped and tortured, she says, it would be better than not being with her daughter.

What do you say to the 13-year-old girl who describes the warehouses where she and the others lived and would be pulled out, three at a time, to be raped by the men? When her brother found out, he killed himself.

Canada's top court says doctors need to kill to help patients

Should I still become a doctor, Mommy?

"There is no fault in ending a life without value."                                                      - Adolf Hitler*

Yesterday the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously decided that Canada needs to legalize physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. This is Canada's Roe v. Wade, only this one is granting permission for doctors to kill after birth.

Not a single Justice on the Supreme Court dissented. Outside the Court's ivory tower, lowly ordinary citizens are adrift in a raging sea of conflicting perspectives on this incredibly contentious issue. But behind the giant black doors of the top court, the Justices are all of a remarkably single mind. The deck of cards is stacked. North of the 49th, conservative judges and lawyers are about as rare as a white tiger.

What are the circumstances under which assisted suicide or euthanasia will be permitted by the Supreme Court? As presented by CTV News:

[T]he patient should be "a competent adult" who "clearly consents" to end their life, and who has a "grievous and irremediable medical condition." That could include a disease, but it could also include a disability that causes "enduring suffering" and that is intolerable to the individual.

While the media is generally presenting the definition of the Supreme Court as "narrow", with a closer look the narrowness of these limits all but disappears. Click to read Andrew Coyne's scathing take on how this ruling takes a big step down the slippery slope.

Are public high schools dumbing down?

A friend recently had a long conversation with a public high school teacher in the Ottawa area, and he was so disturbed by what the teacher had to say that he took the trouble to write out the points of concern.

Here is a rundown of the teacher's observations, as written by my friend:

• In the ten years he has taught he has noticed a continuous and noticeable decline in student attention spans, especially in the last five years.
• It is a constant battle to control their use of smartphones in the classroom. 
• Academic expectations have been dumbed down and grades inflated across the board.
• He says no one fails and no one really succeeds (bright students become bored and disruptive in classes that they find unchallenging).
• This dumbing down of standards affects colleges and universities as well.
• Student use of the internet to cheat or copy is endemic.
• The easy access to information that the internet provides has destroyed curiosity in many of them.
• Students are passive learners (waiting for you to tell them what to do and how to do it). This is attributed in part to parents and teachers over-managing their children/student's lives.