Welcome to the LSIS Investigative Journal

Welcome to the LSIS Investigative Journal

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Heavy drinking, 'incompatible' drinking tied to divorce, study says

Heavy drinking, 'incompatible' drinking tied to divorce, study says


couple making a toast


Los Angeles Times
By Eryn Brown
February 6, 2013, 5:30 a.m.

Here’s something to ponder if and when you and your spouse make your Valentine’s Day toasts this year: when it comes to drinking — as in so many other facets of marriage — compatibility may be key to keeping couples together.

Researchers reviewing data collected from 19,977 married couples in one county in Norway reported that spouses who consume about the same amount of alcohol were less likely to divorce than pairs where one partner is a heavy drinker and the other is not — especially when the wife is the one doing the drinking.

By reviewing such a large data set, the team, which reported its findings (abstract here, subscription required for full text)Tuesday in the online edition of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, were able to tease out some of the alcohol-related dynamics within couples that lead to marriage dissolution.

They found that divorce was generally more common in couples with high rates of alcohol consumption, but that the highest divorce rates were found in couples where only the woman was a heavy drinker. Among couples where the wife reported being a heavy drinker (a measure that including admission of an indication of "hazardous drinking") and the husband a light drinker, the divorce rate was 26.8%; when the positions were switched and the husband was the heavy drinker, the divorce rate was 13.1%.

In couples where both members were heavy drinkers, the divorce rate was 17.2%.

Norwegian Institute of Public Health researcher Fartein Ask Torvik, the lead author of the study, speculated that drinking in women upended marriages for a couple of reasons.  One reason, he noted in a statement, is that women seem to be affected more strongly by alcohol than men are — so their drinking could impair them, and add risk in a marriage, more than a man’s heavy drinking might.  The team also wrote that drinking “may be judged as incompatible with female roles,” and thus a particular threat to marital stability. 

It was “of major interest” that a woman’s drinking more than her husband does seemed to strongly predict divorce, said his colleague Norwegian Institute of Public Health director Ellinor F. Major, who was not listed as a study co-author.

“Couples who intend to marry should be aware of the drinking pattern of their partner, since it may become a problem in the future,” she said in the statement.

The best approach might be for husbands and wives to strive for matching amounts of light or moderate drinking, she said.

Couples in the study who both reported being light drinkers divorced just 5.8% of the time.














Tuesday, February 5, 2013

MUST SEE: Amazing Interview With Hatchet-Wielding Homeless Hitchhiker Who Took Down Man Claiming To Be Jesus

MUST SEE: Amazing Interview With Hatchet-Wielding Homeless Hitchhiker Who Took Down Man Claiming To Be Jesus





Local news is an often-wonderful, even-more-often-bizarre place. And never was the latter more evident than in a recent story that aired on KMPH FOX 26 in Fresno, Calif. About a man claiming to be Jesus and the homeless hitchhiker who saved the day with a hatchet.

For starters, here’s what happened: A man claiming to be Jesus apparently plowed his car into a PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric) worker — pinning him between the car and his truck — because he was black. Two women who were nearby ran over to help, but witnessed a crazy scene.

“The guy just went crazy and was trying to pull the guy from underneath the car and the truck, and then he gets in his car and tries to move the car… and we weren’t going to let him do it,” one of the women, Tanya Baker, told KMPH’s Jessob Reisbeck. “He just kept saying he’s Jesus Christ and he’s going to save all of us… but we have to get — he used the n-word, meaning the black people… and we need to get them off the earth.”

The worker was treated for non-life threatening injuries (two broken legs) at the hospital. But the story still wasn’t over. The driver evidently also went after one of the women (a “bear hug” turned into “beating the crap out of me”).

Enter homeless hitchhiker Kai (who was in the car with the crazy driver). “Like a guy that big can snap a woman’s neck like a pencil stick,” he told Reisbeck. “So I fucking ran up behind him with a hatchet — smash, smash, suh-mash!”

Tanya said that saved her life. The driver, described as over six feet tall and around 300 pounds, had a cut on the head after the incident.

But the story that aired on KMPH wasn’t the whole story. Reisbeck later posted the raw, unedited video of his interview with Kai. And it is nothing short of amazing.

Speaking to Reisbeck, Kai prefaced the interview by offering a message: “No matter what you’ve done, you deserve respect. Even if you make mistakes, you lovable. And it doesn’t matter your looks, skills, or age, your size or anything — you’re worthwhile. No one can ever take that away from you.”

He went on to offer a profanity-laced narrative of what happened, including some choice anecdotes from his interaction with the driver in the car (“He’s like, ‘I raped this 14-year-old,’ and starts crying and gives me a big hug.’”)

“Dude, that guy was fuckin’ kooked out, man,” he told Reisbeck. As for himself, he said his name was Kai and doesn’t have a last name (“no, bro, I don’t have anything”).

The rest of the interview is worth a watch, but I’ll leave you with this: “I’m like, ‘Bro, if you’re fuckin’ Jesus Christ, I’ll be the anti-Christ, man, like fuck that shit.”