Daily Archives: May 7, 2013

Are the effects of nrop reversible?

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It’s an unexpected topic for the Wall Street Journal editorial columns, but — Hey! — it’s a Murdoch paper.

Today 12% of websites are pornographic, and 40 million Americans are regular visitors—including 70% of 18- to 34-year-olds, who look at porn at least once a month, according to a recent survey by Cosmopolitan magazine (which, let’s face it, is the authority here). Fully 94% of therapists in another survey reported seeing an increase in people addicted to porn. It has become a whole generation’s sex education and could be the same for the next—they are fumbling around online, not in the back seat. One estimate now puts the average age of first viewing at 11. Imagine seeing “Last Tango in Paris” before your first kiss.

Countless studies connect porn with a new and negative attitude to intimate relationships, and neurological imaging confirms it. Susan Fiske, professor of psychology at Princeton University, used MRI scans in 2010 to analyze men watching porn. Afterward, brain activity revealed, they looked at women more as objects than as people. The new DSM-5 will add the diagnosis “Hypersexual Disorder,” which includes compulsive pornography use.

Repetitive viewing of pornography resets neural pathways, creating the need for a type and level of stimulation not satiable in real life. The user is thrilled, then doomed.

But here’s the good news: “the evolutionary plasticity of our mind makes this damage reversible.”

It was apparently the way in which young men nowadays learn about sex from porn sites that set Cindy Gallop off on the track which led to her new business, makelovenotporn.tv.

So where some people see a problem, others see an opportunity. Isn’t capitalism wonderful?

Al Baba

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Well, isn’t this interesting. Turns out that Al Gore is quite well off. Almost as wealthy as Mitt Romney, it seems, according to this Bloomberg report.

In 1999, Al Gore, then U.S. vice president and a Democratic candidate for president, sold $6,000 worth of cows.

The former senator, who spent most of his working life in Congress, had a net worth of about $1.7 million and assets that included pasture rents from a family farm and royalties from a zinc mine, remnants of his rural roots in Carthage, Tennessee. Funds from the cattle sale went to three of his kids, according to federal disclosure forms filed as part of his presidential run.

Fourteen years later, he made an estimated $100 million in a single month. In January, the Current TV network, which he helped to start in 2004, was sold to Qatari-owned Al Jazeera Satellite Network for about $500 million. After debt, he grossed an estimated $70 million for his 20 percent stake, according to people familiar with the transaction.

Two weeks later, Gore exercised options, at $7.48 a share, on 59,000 shares of Apple Inc. stock that he’d been granted for serving on the Cupertino, California-based company’s board since 2003. On paper, it was about a $30 million payday based on the company’s share price on the day he claimed the options.

That’s a pretty good January for a guy who couldn’t yet call himself a multimillionaire when he briefly slipped from public life after his bitterly contested presidential election loss to George W. Bush in late 2000, based on 1999 and 2000 disclosure forms.

And he’s still got another 50,000 Apple shares to go. Seems like Forrest Gump isn’t the only innocent to profit from Steve Jobs’s largesse.