What's Wrong...

...with sex selective abortions?

...this ultimate form of misogyny can happen in any culture that fails to defend the intrinsic dignity of every human life. Abortion rights ha[ve] led to one of the bitterest ironies of our post-feminist age: that the abortion license touted as the key to liberating future generations of women would become the preferred means of eradicating them.

Logically, I don't get what the big deal is. I mean, if you believe, as Vox pointed out, that a woman's prerogative to murder the fetus developing inside her is absolute, then there cannot be anything wrong with picking and choosing who lives and who dies. Right? Isn't this what a woman does when she exercises her "choice"? So what the eff are you feminut women complaining about? Or are you just bitching because it isn't boys being murdered in equal proportion to the girls? Why do you even care? Aren't all humans just the result of accidental pairings of proteins? Aren't we just matter in motion, with no more moral significance than algae? How can random mutations have any "intrinsic dignity" whatsoever?

And here's another very pertinent question: Would you still be bitching if it were boys being liquidated wholesale like these Asian girls? Would you?

Cricket...

Cricket...

Didn't think so, you sexist murderous abortionette oxygen thieves.

Feminism: helping keep the words "women" and "logic" from appearing together in the same sentence, since the 19th century

New Additions to the Blogroll

Your gracious host has added some new links to the blogroll here at EW for your marriage and family reading pleasure:

First is the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood blog, which discusses gender issues from a biblical perspective.

Second is the Hawaiian Libertarian. Libertarian political philosophy mixed with commentary on gender issues from a men's rights perspective.

Go check them out if you have the time.

"Prince Caspian" And Women In Combat

The CBMW blog notes that even evangelicals are following the remainder of the culture by implicitly accept a wider role for women in warfare and other forms of violent conflict:

[H]ave we as evangelical Christians come to accept unconsciously the idea of women serving in combat roles without noticing any conflict between this and the biblical view of men and women? In Old Testament Israel, the men—-not the women—-had the duty of serving in combat, when war was necessary.

According to evangelical historian Harold O. J. Brown, "Within both Judaism and Christianity, indeed almost universally in all human culture, the military profession has been reserved for males".

R. Albert Mohler Jr. writes, "A nation's character is demonstrated in many ways, and its treatment of women is one of the most significant indicators of cultural and moral health. . . . The dignity of women is to be defended by men, not undermined by vulnerability in the extreme conditions of combat." To refrain from sending women into combat is not to assign a status of inferiority to them; it is rightly to honor them and affirm their dignity

The answer to the author's rhetorical question of "have evangelicals accepted the idea of women in combat?" is yes. They accepted this idea when they accepted women as full citizens with rights equal or greater than that of men. With those rights came obligations.

One of these obligations is to serve in the nation's armed forces when called upon. This is a fundamental concept of citizenship in the Western democratic tradition...if you are not permitted or willing to serve, you are either a coward or a civic halfling. Moreover, one shouldn't be a citizen unless you also share in the collective obligation to defend the nation...imagine the social injustice that occurs (as does today in the United States) when people vote to send others to war while they themselves are immune to the risk of being conscripted into the fight.

Thus, once women were elevated to the same status as men, there was instant cultural pressure to have them fulfill the obligations that comes with these rights. As discussed above, this includes roles in national defense.

The blog post makes an excellent biblical--but narrow--case for why women aren't to be permitted in combat. But in doing so, it misses the larger point entirely. By granting full citizenship rights to women (contrary to the biblical precepts expounded by Paul),women are automatically cast as warriors as well as wives and helpmeets. That women are statutorily proscribed from being drafted in our country, besides being terribly sexist, is beside the point. They have are already strayed into social roles that are assigned by God for men, and it is difficult to logically defend arbitrary proscriptions against combat roles for women when they are doing everything else that a man may do. And if recent trends hold, modern warfare seems to be rendering these prohibitions moot, as there is no front line in irregular warfare.

So, if one opposes women in combat, it is not sufficient to simply attempt to keep women from the front lines. For, as we've seen above, they'll end up there eventually. No, if one opposes women in combat, then you must strip women of suffrage and other rights and responsibilities that come with full citizenship. No other remedy will be effective.

Would this disenfranchisement make them second-class citizens? Absolutely. But with rights comes responsibilities, and as second class citizens, they don't have the duty or the temptation to risk their lives in defense of the polity.

Voting For the Lesser of Two Evils...

...is still a vote for evil. I won't do it again. I can't do it again.

Wachel Lukas may think I have a poopy plan, that I am just downright Phyrric (there's my Greek / Thucydides reference for today--ha!) in my refusal to vote for McCain because the alternative will be worse. She's right, the alternative will be worse, but I agree with one of Lukas' commenters that it won't be that much worse. It certainly won't be the Armageddon that many of the conservative commentariat would have us believe.

I'm sorry, but I just can't go vote R this time at the Federal level since the establishment Republican Party has moved so far left. They NEED to be unsupported so they can go the way of the Whigs and be replaced by a party that is a bit more authentic and true to the will of the base and true to the cause of liberty. As Ron Paul said in a recent interview, "getting credibility back is the main thing", and I do not believe that the Republican Party will regain that credibility anytime soon unless they start pushing a conservative message again.

The Worst Unsolicited Advice...

...always seems to issue forth from graduation speakers at colleges this time of year. Tom Brewton cites Obama's contribution to counterproductive platitudes:

The two worst admonitions commencement speakers can give to graduating students are “Go out and change the world,” and “Go into public service.” Senator Obama employed both in his recent address to graduating students at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

Urging inexperienced young students...to change the world is like turning a kindergarten class loose in the control room of a nuclear reactor and urging them to experiment with dials and buttons. Young people know how to destroy, as did the Baby Boomer student activists, but preserving the good and building for posterity is beyond them. The proper admonition is to work productively in useful businesses and professions while gaining wisdom and understanding of the real world, before tinkering with complexities that they do not yet comprehend.

Urging students to go into public service is to promote the least productive and most counterproductive element of society.

Not much to add to this, other than I think that while Obama's call for "public" service is code for more people to both line up and suckle from the public teat and/or join the hordes of government agents eating out the People's substance.

Rather, the important lesson here that young people need to learn is to serve. As in serve others as they would someone greater than themselves, and the best places to do that are usually NOT in government service.

Andrew Jackson's "I Told You So"

"Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves."

Andrew Jackson, on the late 18th-century / early 19th-century efforts to establish a central bank in the United States.

It's ironic that this man's face today graces the $20 bill...probably a parting shot at a steadfast opponent of a central bank and fiat currency.

Double Standards and Gold-Digging

I had the misfortune the other day of watching portions of What Women Want, starring Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt. One thing I noted about the movie, which did have its genuinely funny parts, was the consistent drum beat that men are sexist, sex-crazed pigs and women are holy and long-suffering. In short, men are bad, women are good. Nothing new to see here, just move along about your business.

This message was most blatantly conveyed in a scene where Mel Gibson's character feebly attempts to counsel his sexually precocious 15-year-old daughter, played by Ashley Johnson, away from her plans to have sex with her 17-year-old boyfriend at the prom. And sure enough, out comes the predictable message: boys only want no-strings-sex, while girls are more refined: they want real relationships, something more than just simple animalistic rutting. The implication of course is that boys are craven, hormonally charged monsters while girls are virtuous innocents who must be on their guard at all times.

Then I happened across an article in the TimesOnline (UK), which illustrated even more that this simplistic, Marxo-Victorian "men bad, women good" narrative desperately needs to change. The bottom line is, women are just as capable of shallow, self-interested, exploitative behavior as men are regularly accused of:

With thousands of job losses announced and more rumoured to be on the way, divorce specialists say that some wives want to secure good divorce deals before their husbands lose their jobs. Consequently, divorce specialists have seen the number of inquiries treble.

Sandra Davis, of matrimonial law specialists Mishcon de Reya said: "When money looks like flying out of the window, love walks out of the door".

This is a perfect example of what ticks me off the most about the popular characatures of men and women. It's not that men can be quite shallow in their pursuit of sexual intercourse. I don't deny this, as I know this to be true.

Rather, it's that women are equally capable of shallowness in their craven pursuit of material security. That love sometimes has nothing to do with it--it's all about the bigger better deal. And that no one ever seems to call women on it.

Men's straightforward pursuit of sex, however biologically programmed, is dirty and vulgar, but women's trading of sex (or promises of sex) in exchange for money or trinkets or favors is somehow more virtuous.

Evils of Feminism, Part IX

The Feminist Silent Spring: Betrayed Into Childlessness

Uh-oh. You know things are bad when the daughter of a feminist icon indicts the very ideology under which she herself was raised:

I believe feminism is an experiment, and all experiments need to be assessed on their results. Then, when you see huge mistakes have been paid, you need to make alterations.

Feminism has much to answer for denigrating men and encouraging women to seek independence whatever the cost to their families. It was drummed into me that being a mother, raising children and running a home were a form of slavery...[e]ven now, I meet women in their 30s who are ambivalent about having a family.

Having a career, travelling the world and being independent were what really mattered...[t]he ease with which people can get divorced these days doesn't take into account the toll on children. That's all part of the unfinished business of feminism.

Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating.

Feminism will perish when either one of two things happen: it succeeds in killing its host--the (classically) liberal Western society--or when a majority of women come to their senses and reject the selfish ideology that denies the truth of their inner nature and/or the obvious negative effects of their actions on those around them.

All women at some level know or sense that feminism hurts men and children, that it is selfish and counter-productive, that it not loving but hateful, that it offers a fraudulent, materialistic independence, and that it is a demographic suicide pact. Which partially explains why many women are so angry all of the time. They've traded truth for a lie. They intuit that they've been swindled, they just don't know by who, or when, or why.

So they lash out at the first dissimilar-to-me person(s) they find--the men in their lives--and heap abuse (that is, if they even have them) upon their children through their ill-considered 'choices'.

HT: Vox

Engineer Check

Gay Marriage Kultursmog

CrunchyCon Rod Dreher makes a case for state involvement in marriage, and forces me to rethink my laissez-faire attitude vis-a-vis the state and homosexual marriage. If only for a minute:

Some issues are so morally consequential as to affect the moral ecology of an entire society. Along those lines, do the polygamous marriages at the FLDS compound in west Texas hurt your own marriage? It would be impossible to establish a direct correlation there, but I doubt most people would be willing to relax the state's ban on polygamy (the matter of underage brides is a separate question). Why don't we allow polygamous (plural) marriage? Would it keep people who wanted to live in monogamous marriages, gay or straight, from doing so? Of course it wouldn't. So why not polygamy? Let's hear the secular rationale for banning plural marriage. Please take care to explain why it's okay for the law to forbid consenting adults who want to live in plural marriages from doing so, but we have a constitutional imperative to allow same-sex couples to do this.

First, I will say that Dreher is exactly correct about the precedent that homosexual marriage sets, and what it means for other non-traditional forms of "marriage"...namely that once the state allows homosexual "marriage", it can do nothing to oppose the sorts of polygamy characterized by the FLDS compound in San Angelo.

He also makes an accurate observation about the effect on the moral ecology of allowing polygamy to exist in our culture:

We expect the state to come down hard on polygamists because we recognize, if only intuitively, that maintaining the moral ecology of our culture requires saying, "Thou shalt not" to polygamy, and enforcing that precept with the power of the law. The polygamist's community's plural marriages affect everybody else's marriages by implicitly delegitimating the normative model

To be specific, the Texas case is about a special case of polygamy called polygyny. Polygyny is rare, at least in Anglophone countries. And he quite correctly complains about the prospect of homosexual marriage delegitimizing marriage. But he misses the fact that the normative, monagamous model of marriage was not delegitimized last week. It was undermined over the span of the last 75-100 years, when divorce became acceptable behavior in polite society (note that the recent decline in the divorce rate is due to skyrocketing cohabitation in lieu of marriage):



This graph was produced from data found online here

Moreover, social science data shows that 75% of women will remarry following a divorce within 10 years. We also know that anywhere from 66% to 90% of divorce actions are brought by women. With remarriage, these women (and the small proportion of men who initiate divorce only to later remarry) become "serial polygamists"--they enter in to marriages that they will eventually dissolve, and then they start the process over again by remarrying.

So we have established that men and women who divorce and remarry are de facto polygamists. I will next show just how widespread polygamy is in our country.

Due to the idiosyncracies of family law, in the US today, a divorcing mother retains custody of the children. As a bonus prize, she also retains a state-enforced claim to a portion of her former husband's earnings regardless of if/when she remarries.

This claim to another man's earnings is key, because under our present system of family law, women who've married multiple times are polyanderers, if not in form, at least in practical effect. She has multiple men supporting her and her household. Now I'll grant you that, temporally speaking, such a woman doesn't have more than one man in the house at a time. But my key point here is that she doesn't have to...she retains a portion of his earning potential after she's kicked him to the curb. Thus, in essence, there is more than one man contributing to the family, making the woman/wife a polyanderer.

And going back to Dreher's original post, he makes an implied appeal for the State to proscribe homosexual marriage because of the negative effects that homosexual marriage will have on our moral ecology. If he's looking for a space for the State to step in and rescue the moral ecology, it would be to outlaw polyandry in all its forms in our country.

Because of this socially acceptable--even socially rewarded--polyandry, traditional marriage has been sick, gradually inching closer to death for years. And Dreher nails the root cause of this sickness as cultural in nature...

Gay marriage is and is not a sudden shift in the meaning of marriage. It started with the Reformation. The reason I think gay marriage cannot be stopped, only delayed, is because it is only the latest manifestation of deep social trends in the West going back centuries. These currents run so deep in our civilization they carry us all along without many of us being aware of how far from shore we're receding.

...although as a Protestant, I quibble with Catholic Dreher's citing of the Reformation as a rejection of God for the wisdom of man...that was the doings of the Enlightenment. The Reformation was the rejection of priestcraft for the pure Word.

HRC's Latest Gaffe

Look, I'm no fan of the Lizard Queen. There's nothing scarier than a person who wants power so badly that she's willing to do almost anything to get it.

But the reporting on her latest public gaffe is just plain wrong and irresponsible and disgusting. How can the Fourth Estate call themselves impartial? It's obvious that they have their man, and she isn't it, and they'll pile on her until she gives up.

From the New York Daily News:

SICK. Disgusting. And yet revealing. Hillary Clinton is staying in the race in the event some nut kills Barack Obama...We have seen an X-ray of a very dark soul

And from the New York Post:

HILL'S 'ASSASSIN' TALK A SHOCKER. EXCUSE FOR NOT QUITTING: HEY, RFK GOT SHOT IN JUNE!

And those were just the top headlines on Drudge. I ended up having to go the Faux News of all places for a more reasoned take:

After a brief off the record defense of Clinton’s comments, Campaign spokesman Mo Elleithee gave reporters what they were looking for. “She was simply referencing her husband in 1992 and Bobby Kennedy in 1968 as historical examples of the nominating process going well into the summer,” he said. “Any reading into it beyond that would be inaccurate.”

The ‘reading into it’ they might be worried about is speculation that Clinton would deliberately bring up talk of assassination to raise fears that, as an African American candidate, Obama might face the same danger as Kennedy. Before his big win in Iowa, many African Americans in the South cited the danger of assassination as a reason not to support Obama.

But Clinton has made a similar “long primaries are fine” argument before — once with a more oblique reference to the Kennedy assassination. “If you look at successful presidential campaigns, my husband didn’t get the nomination until June of 1992. I remember, tragically, Senator Kennedy won California near the end of that process,” she said at a DC fundraiser on May 7th. “It has often gone on. And we have a lot to work out here. Because we have to figure out who would be the stronger candidate.”

If one looks at what the woman said, it is impossible to conclude anything other than what she was saying: that it's premature to decide on a candidate. Nothing more. And all this upgroar is just media navel-gazing and circle-jerking.

I Didn't Know It Was This High...

...here I was still thinking that 66% of all divorces (and 75% if the divorce involved children) were initiated by women.

I was floored when I read this stat.

This serves as a warning to those fellows married to, or considering marriage with, a college-schooled gal:

...among college-educated couples, the percentage of divorces initiated by women is approximately 90%

Source: Brinig, Margaret; Douglas W. Allen (2000). "These Boots Are Made for Walking: Why Most Divorce Filers are Women". American Law and Economics Review 2 (1): 126-129. (Reference, Abstract,Full Text)

Update (Aug 7 2009): Reader Dave114 emailed the study's authors about the 90% claim, which is not listed directly in the body of the study. In their response, one of the authors stated that the 90% factoid may be derived from their data provided some assumptions were made. This casts some doubt on the robustness of this 90% claim if one has to jigger with assumptions to obtain results that support the data.

Friday Quotage

These two quotes kinda sums up atheists / secular humanists and their moral system:

When men cease to believe in God, they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything

and

Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God

G. K. Chesterton [1] and [2]

The Readability of EW:

The following table contains the readability results for: http://elusivewapiti.blogspot.com.

Total sentences: 1261
Total words: 12174
Average words per Sentence: 9.65
Words with 1 Syllable: 7310
Words with 2 Syllables: 2410
Words with 3 Syllables: 1388
Words with 4 or more Syllables: 1066
Percentage of word with three or more syllables: 20.16%
Average Syllables per Word: 1.69
Gunning Fog Index: 11.92
Flesch Reading Ease: 54.17
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 8.10

In all, it appears that one needs somewhere between a middle school and HS education to lurk here, or about the same level of schooling as required to read the WSJ. That's fine with me.

Test the readability of your blog by clicking here.

When Is A Sex Crime Not A Crime?

When there is no perpetrator and no victim:

Prosecutor Shauna Bolicker warned the jury in opening statements Tuesday that the "vile, disturbing and disgusting" video shows Kelly having sex with an underage girl. Bolicker told jurors they would see the "crime unfold ... frame by ugly frame" in the video, which she said was "choreographed, produced, and starring Robert Kelly."

Defense attorney Sam Adam Jr. countered that even the FBI, "the same people chasing bin Laden ... cannot identify Mr. Kelly as being on the tape." Shouting at times, Adams told the jury that it is not Kelly on the tape and that the girl was "a paid, professional prostitute."

On the tape, the man's face is seen only in profile, but the face of the alleged underage girl is plainly visible. At times she appears bored, and she rarely speaks, except when the man tells her to call him "Daddy." The alleged victim, now 23, denies that she's the girl in the video.

The defense asserts that Kelly has a "significant" mole in the middle of his lower back that has been there since childhood. But he said the man on the tape did not have the mole. "There is no mole on his back," Adam said. "Robert isn't that man on the tape."

Hmmm. Can't show that the accused is the man on the tape. The alleged victim says that she's not the underage hooker on the tape.

How did this even make it to court? To show how tough the DA is on "child porn"?

Oh, and I loved how the sketch artists were ordered to not sketch the video on penalty of they themselves being jacked up on child porn charges. But it's "for the children", so I guess it's okay.

More Gas Price Buffoonery

In a second installment to my "Assume the Position for the Oil Companies" post, here is some more food for thought as we blitz through $130/bbl oil:



Ever heard the phrase "not worth a Continental"? Well at the rate we're going with inflation and all, pretty soon the Fed will have to issue special "fuel scrip" just so we can purchase gas:



Update: High gas prices force Tenn farmers to switch to mules.

UK Women Win Right To Children w/o Fathers...

...so shrieked the UK media:

Single women and lesbian couples won landmark parental rights last night as MPs voted to remove the requirement that fertility clinics consider a child’s need for a father. It will stop fertility clinics turning away lesbians and single women because their children will not have a father or male role model. MPs who backed the fatherhood amendments said the traditional family would be undermined. Iain Duncan Smith, who proposed enshrining the importance of a father and mother, said that the new law would amount to telling couples that “fathers are not important, or are less important than mothers”.

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, had warned it would remove the father from the heart of the family.

*Yawn*. Talk about a day late, a dollar (or in this case, a pound) short. Once again, conservative legislators prove they are the proverbial frog being boiled to death. They only notice the threat when it's far too late.

This legislation only affects a very small minority of single women and lesbian couples. For fun, let's call this number 10-15% of the total amount of women raising children without the biological father in the home. Of the remaining 85%, 4/5 booted the dad out of the home, in effect saying "fathers aren't needed". These hordes of women, 118,000 each year to be exact (80% of 148,000 divorces annually in the UK), represent a much larger cohort than the relatively meager "man-not-included" crowd.


'Sorry love, Unwanted fathers go in the yellow bags.'
Image Source: Daily Mail UK

It is this large body of women who have removed the father from the heart of the British family, not a few limey lesbians.

UK women didn't win the right to children without fathers yesterday. It happened 35 years ago, in the early 1970s, when the "right" to a no-fault divorce was granted for British women. Where were these conservative Tory MPs then?

Random Links

17 y.o. boy posts naked pictures of 16 y.o. ex girlfriend on MySpace page and is arrested and charged with possession of child porn, defamation, and sexual exploitation of a child. Turns out that the pictures in question were taken by the girl herself and sent to the boy via email. Which begs the question why she also wasn't taken into custody for possession of child porn, trafficking in child porn, and sexual exploitation of a child? Is this yet another corollary to the "female sentencing discount", where males are held responsible for crimes that females are given carte blanche for?

American Airlines to start charging for checked baggage. While the story concentrates on the profits to be made by AA charging for that additional "service", I wonder how much of it is driven by fuel costs. Baggage translates into weight, and if they can cut down on weight, they increase fuel economy. Or even better, use that hold space previously dedicated to pax baggage to transport cargo from paying customers.

Obama tried to tout his faith in a futile attempt to woo (mostly white) Kentucky voters away from Clinton. Exactly what faith is he espousing? A Christian faith? Or a faith in black liberation theology which melds a racialist viewpoint with some Christian-like elements to it to make it smell better to ignant white folk?

Losing sleep does more than just make you tired the next day. It
is also dangerous. "People who are sleep-deprived alternate between periods of near-normal brain function and dramatic lapses in attention and visual processing". Something to consider for doctors and flight crews who are regularly sleep-deprived or who have frequent circadian disruption.

If Ya Can't Draw Pistols...

...whip out a taser instead:

BOULDER, Colorado (AP) -- It wasn't exactly pistols at 30 paces, but police say a security company supervisor and a restaurateur shot each other with Tasers in a "bonehead" confrontation over parking.

The Tasering was "just kind of a bonehead deal." Police Sgt. Pat Wyton told the Camera newspaper.

Officers said neither man needed medical attention after the Saturday confrontation, but Harvey Epstein, co-owner of Mamacitas restaurant, was arrested on suspicion of felony menacing and using a stun gun.

I guess if you can't qualify to be a cop, being a rent-a-cop is the next best thing. What is it about a badge and a gun that attracts the kind of people that like to lord it over others?

I'm Done...

...with pushing on a rope just to see my children.

I'm tired of the constant anger, and the costs that the pitched battle to see my kids have exacted from me and my family: be it personal, emotional, family, professional, and monetary. The aggravation is starting to show up as diminished performance on the flight deck again--not quite as bad as in the months immediately after my ex kidnapped my children and spirited them across the country in a surprise preemptive-strike--but enough to get my attention, and enough for me to take myself off the flight schedule for a while. I've noticed that I've been unusually scatterbrained in the air, and aviation is a horribly unforgiving profession if one is distracted or careless.

I'm tired of the garbage that the constant legal and psychic combat with a psychotic, mean-spirited, daresay evil woman brings into my home and into my relationship with Mrs Wapiti and my other, youngest son. I'm tired of the constant visitation interference, the false abuse allegations, the false neglect allegations, the false rape allegations, and the false allegations of defrauding my employer. I'm tired of contempt of court actions, most recently because I took my kids to a child psychologist to assess the psychological damage from her polemical assassination of my character in their presence. I'm tired of the PAS. I'm just tired of all of it.

Most of all, I'm tired of a legal system that doesn't care about fathers and a man's relationship with his children; it's only objective, indeed, what the system is paid to do, is to ensure that so-called child support monies flow from obligor to obligee. Nothing else matters to the house-men bedecked in black robes who enable the forcible separation of innocent men from their helpless children.

It has bowlderized my prayer life, and has taken a huge bite out of my personal health, which also hasn't helped the spiritual situation either. Many times in the past few weeks I've felt hollow, in a dark place, without the presence of God, and I'm tired of being there.

So now, that I'm officially at the end of my rope, I'm done playing this game. Satan shall no longer attack me through my ex. I am offering up my children to God, the original Single Dad, may He protect them and care for them, because I, their earthly dad, am no longer allowed to do so. I'll do what I can to show them the Path, the rest is up to Him.

And now I know why some men drop out of their children's lives. Because it hurts so much to stay in. They can't afford to keep fighting any longer, so they drop out, become the "ghost dads" that I blogged about back in February:

Thus, this article in the Canadian paper Globe and Mail really hit home for me. The author documents some of the many ways in which fortress moms can make a non-custodial dad's job of staying involved very difficult, if not impossible. Indeed, 1 of 2 divorced custodial mothers see no value in the continued involvement of a non-resident father, and 25%-40% of custodial moms admit to interfering with visitation to "punish" the father.

...and while I don't think I'll become one of those, I definitely have been reduced to a fraction of my former self. And not by my will, but by hers.

Thus it is with extreme sadness, borne by the realization that I can no longer do the honorable thing by my children, that I cease pushing my ex to see my children. I must satisfy whatever paternal duties I can on a mere 7 weeks a year. God has entrusted me another garden to tend, and I must look after it and lead it.

For Everything Else, There's MasterCard, Part II

Round-trip plane ticket from the mountain west to the East Coast: $480

Rental car: $80

Staying with friends for two nights: $Free

Fees incurred because you have to roll in your attorney to convince your ex to allow you to see your kids for an overnight visit: $900

The look on your boys' faces when they see you for the first time in three months:

Priceless

Top 10 Out of Office Replies

Some sample out of office replies for this advanced information age:

1. I am currently out of the office at a job interview and will reply to you if I fail to get the position. Please be prepared for my mood.

2. You are receiving this automatic notification because I am out of the office. If I was in, chances are you wouldn't have received anything at all.

3. Sorry to have missed you, but I'm at the doctor's having my brain and heart removed so I can be promoted to our management team.

4. I will be unable to delete all the emails you send me until I return from vacation. Please be patient, and your mail will be deleted in the order it was received.

5. Thank you for your email. Your credit card has been charged $5.99 for the first 10 words and $1.99 for each additional word in your message.

6. The email server is unable to verify your server connection. Your message has not been delivered. Please restart your computer and try sending again.

7. Thank you for your message, which has been added to a queuing system. You are currently in 352nd place, and can expect to receive a reply in approximately 19 weeks.

8. Hi, I'm thinking about what you've just sent me. Please wait by your PC for my response.

9. I've run away to join a different circus.

10. I will be out of the office for the next two weeks for medical reasons. When I return, please refer to me as 'Lucille' instead of Steve.

Indian PM Rolls for Feminist Activists

No doubt responding to the cacophony raised by feminists over sex-selection abortions, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called for greater enforcement of an Indian law meant to counter India's "national shame":

No nation, no society, no community can hold its head high and claim to be part of the civilized world if it condones the practice of discriminating against one half of humanity represented by women

If the good prime minister had any modicum of balanced advice on Indian social welfare, he would find that the mortality for male children in India is still higher than that of females even after the death toll from selective abortions of female fetuses was taken into account.

If any half of humanity is being discriminated against in India, it is Indian males, if their already shorter and shortening life expectancy is any indicator of discrimination and diminished freedom. Indian women can already expect to outlive their male counterparts by 5 years.

Moreover, the already large gap in life expectancy between Indian men and women is increasing; if social justice is the goal, why again should even more resources be devoted to increasing this survivability gap even further? The PM speaks eloquently of Indians not being able to hold their head high in civilized society for condoning the practice of discrimination against females. Yet he does nothing to address discrimination against males. What is one to make of that? Is the PM suggesting that it is barbaric when discrimination is directed against women, but it is civilized when no one notices when men are discriminated against, with lethal consequences?

Perhaps I'm being too harsh on PM Singh. He deserves to be congratulated for his partial stand against the modern-day Holocaust that is abortion. Now he just needs to come out against abortions of all kinds, instead of calling for more governmental attention be paid to eliminating only abortions of female fetuses. And if quality of life for all his citizens is the goal, he should attack the factors that result in much higher mortality across the Indian male's lifespan.

Going back to the feminist groups putting pressure on the good PM, as the CBMW Blog authors note, feminist groups in particular are in a particularly difficult and hypocritical position here. Despite the fact that they are the ones crying the loudest about the preferential abortions of female fetuses in India, they are the parties that have the least moral credibility on the subject, since they are the ones who push the notion that a fetus is the property of the mother to be disposed of at any time. They (the CBMW bloggers) also note that the very same problem exists in this country--abortions for sex selection purposes--just on a much smaller scale. That is our national shame, that human life is terminated for the convenience of the parent(s).

Quote o' the Day

"A government powerful enough to supervise virtue is also powerful enough to indulge its own particular vices."

James Pinkerton, in a recent article for American Conservative Magazine

Is Your Professor A Marxist Shill?

HT: Ray, a commenter at Glenn Sacks's place. The comment was made in a discussion about a Dartmouth professor taking legal action against students who protested her feminist, man-bashing indoctrination. Part 1 is here, as are II, III, and IV.

Survey: 1/3 of Moms Have Cheated...

...and 53% of mothers admit to serious adulterous ideation in a "Sex and the American Mom" survey conducted by Cookie Magazine on a self-selected sample of mothers with at least one child.

Other unhappy factoids include:
-- 58% fantasize about sex with "coworkers, delivery men, and other dads"
-- 36% are as attracted to their husbands as the day they were married
-- 24% of moms use visual porn (no word in the survey on how many women use "emotional porn") as the primary means of getting in the mood

There is a bright side, I guess: 32% claim to have sex more often than once per week, 77% want sex more frequently, and a whopping 69% say that they are willing to have sex to please their husbands even if they are not initially in the mood.

There is always danger in putting too much stock in the results of a self-selected survey, but a 34% adultery rate? That's fully 50% higher than the rate at which men cheat on their wives!

Male Victims of Domestic Violence

I have blogged before about the real incidence of female intimate partner aggression: the American Journal of Public health reported that over 70% of DV is initiated by women.

Chauvinist feminists deny that female-on-male DV happens, or otherwise turn a blind eye to the violence that women not only commit but are absolved/excused for...i.e., "he must have deserved it" or "it was in self defense against the Patriarchy".

Part of why I established this blog was to educate those that happened by here as to the truth of things, be it about the subject of divorce, child support, misandry in our culture, generalized political dumbassery, or in this case, a counter-education that exposes the truth about DV.

Today, I stumbled upon a link to the Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men and Women (HT: Mr M at the Psycho Ex Wife). They have some excellent brochures and other literature that highlight the facts about male victims of female DV aggression. Here is the poster they published about this phenomenon:



Take a look if you are so inclined. For my male readers, if you are interested in participating in a study of male victims of DV, they are looking subjects for a planned study on the subject.

Some Wisdom, Finally

This quote from Bush 43 shows that, at least on the issue of energy, the President has an excellent grasp of both the problem and the solution for our energy woes. This stands in sharp contrast to the Luddites in the Democrat party who think that we can conserve our way out of an energy crunch and that an information economy can be supported by Americans cavorting around naked and unbathed and living in thatch-roofed homes:

"Our problem in America gets solved when we aggressively go for domestic exploration. Our problem in America gets solved if we expand our refining capacity, promote nuclear energy and continue our strategy for the advancing of alternative energies as well as conservation," he said.

"One interesting thing about American politics these days is those who are screaming the loudest for increased production from Saudi Arabia are the very same people who are fighting the fiercest against domestic exploration, against the development of nuclear power and against expanding refining capacity."

Memo to Dems and others who would endeavor to put us back into the stone age: preventing the building of any new refineries, and declaring whole areas of barren tundra off-limits to oil and gas exploration, does none of us any good. You like electricity, right? Or how about refrigeration? Or fresh vegetables in the middle of winter? Or even the fuel to fill your SUV or enable your jet plane ride to your district or international flight to pander to some 3d world dictatorship? Just where do you suppose the energy comes from?

Your constituents groan under energy prices that are a partial result of increased (and increasing) demand, yet you promote policies that impoverish them more, and fund the corruption of the regimes in the Middle East and/or fuel Islamic fundamentalist plans for worldwide Sharia in the process. Given how hostile said religious fundamentalists are to your preferred way of life, how does that make sense on any level?

I just shake my head and wonder why is it that political and cultural elites always seem to promote policies that undermine their very existence and those of the masses underneath them? From feminism to communism to environmentalism, they throw their energies behind fads that threaten the very fabric of a society at the top of which they reside.

Why I Don't Care About California's Drift Toward Homogamy

Oh dear. Seems the California Supreme Court has struck down a voter Proposition that proscribed homosexual marriage in California. Not surprisingly, the homosexual lobby is elated, and various pro-marriage groups have vowed to push for a constitutional amendment restricting marriage to one man and one woman.

I've been involved in discussions about this issue in a couple of places in the blogosphere, a little bit over at Vox's place, and a bit more significantly at Glenn Sack's blog. And the bottom line is that I don't really care. Really. Okay, that's not quite true: Portia de Rossi is going to wed Ellen DeGeneres, which is a sad day for single but hopeful male members of her lusty fan club and for the gene pool in general. But other than that, color me unconcerned.

Anyways, my position surprises some because I also consider myself a fundie evangelical Christian...that's right, the very folks who are supposed to be all incensed about this decision and just chomping at the bit to bring some sort of scary theocracy to America. But it really shouldn't be surprising...that's because I don't consider a government marriage to be a marriage at all. It's a counterfeit, the result of a Faustian annexation of a religious sacrament by the Leviathan. And we know the inevitable result of the State getting its grubby hands on anything.

A Vox Day WND column from 2004 summarizes my position regarding homosexual marriage the best; it also echoes what I think marriage proponents and Christian leaders opposed to gay marriage should really be doing:

Instead, if they [cultural conservatives] are truly interested in restoring marriage and the family to their proper places as the twin bulwarks of civilized society, they must leap at the opportunity to remove the state, at all levels, from the process entirely. Marriage is a sacred trinity of a man and a woman before God, there is neither room nor reason for a fourth party to enter into the relationship, still less one that corrupts and destroys the tripartite relationship. Marriage survived for 6,000 years without government, in less than 1 percent of that time, the government has nearly managed to destroy it in this country. There is nothing to fear from removing government from the equation – indeed, doing so will only strengthen true Christian marriage.

The State and Marriage is a joining made in Hell, conducted by the Devil. This is one divorce that conservatives should embrace with all alacrity and enthusiasm.

So much for the homosexual rights activists pigeonholing all of us fundie evangelicals in the "homophobic bigot" box. Yes, I am opposed to homosexuality on religious grounds. I think it is a grave sin that deeply offends God, and I will exhort homosexuals to repent and walk on the Path of Righteousness. But I also think that protecting the freedom to do as you please--including boinking members of the same sex--is more important and a better use of resources than trying to legislate more protections on an already unenforceable contract that is broken at will by nearly 800,000 women and 150,000 men in the USA each year.

If HRAs want a piece of scrip from the government that says they're "married", I say let them have one. Their possessing of that piece of paper does not affect my marriage to Mrs Wapiti one bit, or the marriages of other Christians. Furthermore, I would add that my Christian brothers and sisters and clergy that get so incensed about homosexuals vying for a State marriage are attacking the wrong target. If the decline in authentic spiritual marriage is their concern, then they would stride boldly to preserve the man's role in the home and educate women on biblical womanhood and the evils of divorce. They wouldn't worry about the non-existent threat posed by homosexuals--who are by definition outside the Body--who agitate for a fakie marriage awarded by some bureaucrat.

American Coneheads...

...consuming mass quantities! This article from the NYT (HT: MikeT at CodeMonkeyRamblings) the latest missive in a long line of salvos meant to guilt-trip Americans, who also happen to be the per-capita largest consumer of energy on the planet. This article can and should be circular-filed in the rubbish bin of anti-American, UN propaganda.

What the article glosses over, in its rush to slam on Yanks, is what all this stuff that can be eaten as food is really used for in the American economy. Take a look at this chart:




According to the chart above, Americans are the #1 consumers of corn. What is that corn used for? Do Americans eat 5 ears of corn per day? Is that why Americans are so fat, consuming this starchy vegetable? Or is it that the majority of the corn "consumed" in this country is used as feed for livestock. Putting aside for a moment the fact that a carnivore's diet is not as energy-efficient as that of a vegetarian, one notes that Americans also consume more beef and poultry than anyone else. Could it be that corn is used to feed the cattle which become hamburgers or the chicken which become nuggets? Moreover, another 20-30% of the corn crop is used for biofuel. Add up the numbers and it appears that at least 75% of the corn consumption in the US is for livestock and biofuel. With this in mind, the picture becomes much different indeed.

Now I don't deny that Americans are overfed and underexercised, and I was particularly impressed by the contrast between the poverty I saw in Mexico and the gluttonous food waste at the 5-star Mexican resort I stayed at last month. But transparent agitprop masquerading as unbiased statistical data just makes me mad when some breathless reporter at the Gray Lady parrots some activist's attempt to manipulate public opinion.

More Pay for Less Work

El Borak poses a question to the "women make 76 cents to a man's dollar" wage-gap victimologists:

Therefore while 'discrimination' may be an unresolved issue...it likely reflects the reality of equal pay for equal work: when a man and a woman have exactly the same job title, they are not working the same number of hours at it over the course of a year. In what way is that equal work?

A good question, El B asks. And in asking it, he cites the following statistics that shed some not-so-supportive light on those who attempt to make the case for a dastardly conspiracy to pay women less than they're worth:

1) Female dentists work fewer hours than male ones (NIH study)
2) Women with children work 80% (or less) of the hours that men with children work (BLS stats)
3) Female employees have an absenteeism culture (MSNBC story...see my previous blog entry on female absenteeism here).

To his citations, I add the following:

4) Women work 7.1 hours per day compared to men's 8 hours...a 12% difference (Salary dot com).
5) Men commute longer (US Census Bureau).

So it seems to me that there are plenty of non-discrimination reasons why women are paid less than men for "equal" work in the aggregate...absenteeism, less seniority, taking more desirable jobs that entail less danger and shorter commutes. All these factors add up to lower wages for women. And all are conscious choices that women make. Feminists' own mouthpieces admit as much, stating that only 5c of the 23c "wage gap" is due to discrimination; the rest is a direct consequence of women's choices. In other words, it's equal pay for unequal work.

Which leads me at last to the point of this post: if women who work equal jobs are paid 95c to a man's $1, but women in those "equal jobs" work from 12 - 20% less, then it seems that women are overpaid for their so-called equal work to the tune of 7 to 15%. In other words, men are paid 85c to 93c to a woman's $1 when women's lower workplace productivity is factored in.

Does this anti-male discrimination trouble feminists much? Not really...wage discrimination is only discrimination if it disfavors women. If female statisticians and engineers make 143% and 135% more than their male colleagues respectively, it's a good thing.

So: who's being discriminated against here?

Update: Carey Roberts weighs in on this issue with more evidence that the wage gap applies to dudes rather than bettys, and that the discrimination is being applied the other direction:

Female physicists are getting $6,500 more. Co-eds who majored in petroleum engineering are being offered $4,400 more. And women computer programmers are being enticed with $7,200 extra pay. In fact for dozens of majors and occupations, women coming out of college are getting better offers than men, reveals Warren Farrell in his book, Why Men Earn More. Why these disparities? Because in traditionally male-dominated professions, employers are willing to ante up more greenbacks to attract females in order to forestall a costly discrimination lawsuit [emphasis mine - EW].

Introduction to Concealment Holsters

Read more here from the US Concealed Carry Association (requires Adobe Acrobat reader).

Rethinking the Exclusionary Rule

I tend to be for anything that forces the police to keep their noses clean when code-enforcing against civilians. The application of coercive, even deadly, force needs to be checked at all times lest it get out of control be a force for tyranny versus a force for freedom.

One of those items is something known as the "Exclusionary Rule", which states that evidence obtained improperly is inadmissible in court. This rule is court-made policy that ostensibly forces police departments and DAs to be better behaved. Unfortunately, cases like this (HT: Mike at CodeMonkeyRamblings) make me lose faith in the effectiveness of such rules. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised: the Rule is something after-the-fact, akin to closing the doors after the horses have already fled. Kinda like Deming's "inspecting defects out" vice "designing quality in".

Anyways, this comment really hits the argument right on the head for me with this one-two critique of the Rule:

I don’t think it works at all. It certainly doesn’t help the innocent against police violations, and it doesn’t help to reform police procedures because by the time the rule is applied, it’s years after the police have broken the law and in the meantime they’ve probably been breaking it again and again for years. Also, people don’t get to rely on it unless they go to trial, and since most people plead guilty for lesser offenses, it’s never used.

[Also,] it’s extra-legal, created by judges and not by democratically elected representatives. I’d have no problem with a statute or a constitutional amendment that permits exclusions like this, but I have a strong, strong distaste for judicial legislation because it’s the same thing that brought about Roe v. Wade and 40 million dead babies. I also feel the same way about Miranda, because it’s completely ludicrous that for 150+ years, police were arresting unconstitutionally people without reading them a little speech. Again, I’d be in favor of a Miranda-style thing if it were imposed by statute or by a constitutional amendment, but I cannot stand judges legislating. If we go down that road, it leads to abuses like Scalia haughtily saying that police professionalism protects us. His opinion is no different from anyone elses’ who creates law like that.

I can't really add anything substantive to the second critique. We've been living under the shadow of court-made law ever since Marbury v Madison; the Warren Court just took judicial activism farther than anyone ever imagined and I doubt there's any going back. Legislatures make laws, executives--with the aid of juries--enforce it, and judges interpret it. And let's not forget about juries which choose to validate or nullify the law.

However, the first critique was the most salient for me. The point of the Exclusionary Rule is to "punish" LEA's who violate procedure by submarining their cases. We've seen how effective that really is at protecting the rights of citizens against the terrible power of the Executive (not). I think a better process would be to go at problem "Officers of the Court" directly: prosecute and disbar DAs who tolerate 4th Amendment violations, and to suspend / fire / prosecute LEOs who do commit 4th Amendment violations.

Cool Picture of the Day

Lightning bolt generated by the erupting Chaiten Volcano in Chile, May 2 2008.

Photo Credit: Carlos Gutierrez Reuters.

Privatize Out the FAA?

Here is an interesting article from Mises, which suggests that abolishing federal enforcement agencies such as the FAA and NTSB and pushing the regulation of aviation to insurance companies would save time, money, provide better customer service to the flying public, and be more efficient at setting and enforcing safety standards.

The article argues that market incentives and mechanisms would impel insurance companies to act in the same manner--only better--than the FAA and NTSB do now:

What, then, would these insurance companies demand from the airlines and other aircraft owners in terms of the obligations and conditions stipulated in their insurance contracts? As always, insurance companies seek to minimize the payment of claims to their clients in order to minimize costs and maximize profit. This in turn causes these companies to take a keen interest in making sure that their clients — the aircraft owners — avoid any accidents to the greatest extent possible. In order to accomplish this task the insurance companies would have to cooperate with airlines, industry organizations, airports, aircraft manufacturers and even competitors to develop a common system for the safe and orderly conduct of flight operations. This would include everything from setting up industry-wide standards for airplane navigation and the equivalence of today's pilot licenses, to setting up systems for the filing of flight plans and conducting air traffic control. The insurance companies would then demand that their clients follow these rules as a prerequisite for signing an insurance contract with them.

One should also keep in mind that these insurance companies would only be interested in "regulation" that would actually enhance safety, meaning that any costly redundant regulation deemed unnecessary from a pure safety point of view would be quickly rejected.

It is an interesting thought, to think of a world without an FAA or NTSB. Personally, I don't think it would be anarchy. Air traffic could be self-governing, just like the highway traffic, which depends on peoples' sense of self-preservation and financial disincentives such as higher insurance rates and deductibles to keep order. In fact, air traffic is largely there already. I recently flew a 600-mile cross country with my wife and son in a Cessna 172. I talked to controllers exactly twice and, except for brief moments opening up or closing my flight plan, didn't talk to a single government agent the entire trip--which included an intermediate landing for fuel. There was no big brother looking over my shoulder the whole way to ensure I did everything right...it was my interest in self- and family-preservation and pride in being a professional aviator which made my flight safe.

That said, I don't think a total laissez-faire privatization will work. Getting a bunch of insurance companies together to set a uniform standard for aviation regulation is wishful thinking, and if the author thinks that corporations are immune to the politicking that government is very susceptible to, he's got another thing coming.

I think one would still need the government to set and enforce standards for licensing, just like we do with automobiles, to include revoking licenses for those who demonstrate gross negligence, poor judgement, or have a trend of several code infractions. Also, I think that government would still need to draft and enforce the "rules of the road", as it were, for aviation. Things like speed limits, following distance, and the like.

I also disagree with the author that airport congestion and mishaps are a result of centralized planning and socialized aviation. Congestion is the same thing in the air as on the ground...too many vehicles trying to get to the same place. The solution for airport congestion is the same as it is for highway congestion...build more airports, and allow pilots to navigate at will...in other words, autonomous "load balancing" during periods of heavy use...between them. If anything, the restriction of pilots to certain defined routes, and the airlines' hub system, helps perpetuate congestion.

And mishaps will always be with us, as long as you have humans operating human-designed systems.

Happy Mother's Day

Yeah, what Vox said.

All you moms out there, enjoy your day. Thank you for your sacrifices in bearing and raising the future.

The Triumph of Self Over Nature

This blog post, about a transgender boy-to-girl in Douglas County, Colorado, a bedroom community for Denver, makes an interesting point.

In discussing how the adults around this boy-soon-to-be-girl are enabling this confused child to get in touch with his true gender identity...at age 7, mind you, a commentator at the blog Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood observed that the post-Enlightenment shift from viewing man as a creation of God, with innate qualities, tendencies and habits as a result, to a view that man is whatever he want to make himself to be, has taken full effect:

This is the latest, and perhaps most egregious example, of what theologian David Wells...calls the exchange of nature for self. For nearly 1,800 years, humanity was spoken of as possessing "human nature," and Christians understood that nature as being created by God in His own image. But in the post-Enlightenment world, Wells argues (correctly, I think) that self has emerged to eclipse the traditional understanding of nature. "The self is our interior world, made up of our own thoughts, private intuitions, desire, yearnings, springs of creativity, particularities, all that makes us distinct from every other person. My self is what in fact is unique about me," he writes. "I have a body like that of others, the same legs and arms, but my self is unlike what anyone else has." An accomplice to the emergence of self, Wells argues, has been the newly perceived "right" to define one's own existence. Therefore, I may be born a male biologically, but I say that I am a female or something in between, and so, I am whatever I define myself to be; there is no such thing as intrinsic nature

This is an excellent observation, one that I think helps define why secular humanism is so dangerous. If one rejects the notion that people are created by God, with certain inalienable rights and value and worth as created beings, then one can only logically conclude that rights are only those privileges awarded by government. There can be no universal human rights, and no rights that cannot be abrogated if enough people demand that it be so. Secular humanists...who are atheists by definition, are capable of the most depraved inhumanities, and it is only the (waning) social influence of theists that imposes any sort of morality whatsoever on their conduct.

Which brings me to another point, one that relates to the budding he-she described above. Secular humanism, which looks inward to human reason (without seeming to care that reason is unavoidably influenced by passion), defines moral acts as what feels good or 'seems right'. There is no fixed objective standard upon which to anchor a moral code; the moral code becomes relative and situational. Morality becomes akin to a boat adrift in a storm, battered about by the tides of fashion, the current of the trends of the day or, as in this particular case, the winds of influential social agitators. As the authors of the blog post observed, they have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worship and serve the created rather than the Creator. And just like the people who lived in the time of the Romans, modern society is being consumed by the sinful desires of the heart (Romans 1:24-25).

The Elusive Wapiti: What's The Worst That Can Happen?

Found this slogan generator over at BlogThings. At first, I entered

"wapiti"

and it came back with the entirely dissatisfactory

"Wapiti:It's what's for dinner"

Then,I tried "Elusive Wapiti" with the following result:

Your Slogan Should Be

Elusive wapiti. What's the Worst that Can Happen?

The Slogan Generator

Ahhh, that's much better.

Friday Roundup

Give this gal a medal. Or maybe a push present, or two, or two dozen. 18 kids in 20 years.

Didn't know this was even possible. 10 year old girl gives birth. To a child conceived through rape. By an illegal alien.

HRC unmasks what many of us already know about leftists: they are way more racist and bigoted than right-wingers could even dream of these days. Let alone get away with uttering evidence of same in public. But even I was surprised when she quite publicly tells Democrats: vote for me because I can bring home the honkey vote better than the Magic Negro!

Fla School Fires Teacher...

...for absenteeism. But she contends she was let go because of her part time job in which she strips and lets men leer at her for money:

Shepherd, a single mother with three boys, became a media sensation after claiming she was released from her teaching contract because of her job on a charter boat offering trips with bikini-clad and topless women. The St. Lucie County School District, however, cites Shepherd's “excessive absences,” rather than the buxom and tattooed blonde's gig with Fort Pierce-based Smokin 'Em Charters. Shepherd, a former biology teacher, had more than 30 unexcused absences this school year and two reprimands in her personnel file.

As I tend to be all about freedom of association, I fully support the school district's decision to let her go. Luckily for them, they have documented poor performance. Personally, all it would have taken for me to sack her would be the poor example that she sets for her charges. Shepherd may not like it, but she's a role model for both boys and girls. She knew that when she took the job as a teacher. What kind of message does Shepherd send to young boys? That it's healthy for them to stare at a woman's wobbly bits when that woman is not their wife? And what does she think is in the minds of her male high school students when she shows up in class? Will they not be undressing her with their eyes, and will that thought have not been placed there by Shepherd herself? What is she going to do when one of her customers ends up being one of her students?

And what about the message sent to impressionable teenage girls? That prostituting yourself is harmless fun and "empowering"? That their value as a female is wholly encased in their sexuality? That exploiting men for money is okay?

Of course, listening to this video, it's clear that there was one thing on this not-the-sharpest-tool-in-the-shed woman's mind, and that was the money to be made off her 34E fun bags:



Bikini-wearing teacher fired

And from reading the article, I guess I can take some solace in the fact that she--or at least her manager--has some standards after all:

Over the past few days, Playboy expressed interest in nude shots to the tune of $25,000 per photo, she said. The pictures, according to Smokin' Em Charters owner and Shepherd manager Kathi Coombes, would be done “very tastefully. It's not going to be spread eagle shots or anything like that,” she said. “We also just ran into a person from Victoria's Secret,” she said. “That might be an option, too, yay!”

Whew, for a moment there I was concerned that she was going to take the concept of giving "a mini biology lesson" a bit too far. Boy am I relieved.

The Reverend Gay

Memo to religious cons: if you want to save marriage and have the gay marriage issue disappear, then get the State out of the marriage business:

He said he is entering the civil union because he wants his partner as well as his two daughters from a previous marriage to have the same legal protections afforded heterosexual couples. “I am simply not going to put my life in jeopardy without putting into place the protections for my beloved partner and my children and my grandchildren that are offered to me in a civil union,” Robinson said.

The biggest error, in my opinion, that religious conservatives have made was to blur the line between Church and State back in the 18th and 19th centuries wrt marriage. Marriage is first and foremost a religious institution, and State involvement in marriage only means that fellows such as Robinson will bastardize it and cheapen it. Although I guess he couldn't do much more damage than hetero so-called Christians already have, but that's another topic.

Also, on a different note, while I am not in the best position to tell if God is telling this ordained Episcopal minister (how the heck did that happen!?) that it's okay to shag other men, I am skeptical that God would reverse what He said 4,000 years ago to the Hebrews just so that this fellow can feel "completed".

The Interview

Check out this humorous interview posted over at WW's place.

Somehow I don't think the general provided quite the answer the interviewer was looking for...

Engineering Question of the Day

Q: How much does a house weigh?

A: Apparently more than a one-lane bridge can hold



Update: Super Sleuth Erik seems to have located the owners...

Sa-Prise! I'm A Gen-Xer

You Belong in Generation X

You fit in best with people born between 1961 and 1981. You are fun, laid back, and very independent. You are willing to take risks and live your life however you see fit. You are casual, accepting, and friendly. You see everyone as your equal.

What Generation Do You Belong In?

HT: El Borak

The Death of Romanticism

Educational Romanticism, that is. The CrunchyCon Rod Dreher had an essay recently about how the ideology of "educational romanticism" is starting to die a long-overdue death--thankfully--and what that expiration and transition to a more robust meritocracy means to a society that papers over innate differences in natural ability between citizens:

...there are problems, obviously, with a society built on meritocracy alone. If intelligence is based largely on the genetic lottery, what role is there for justice in such a society? As Jeremy Beer says in his essay in "Wendell Berry: Life and Work," the welfare state tries to compensate for the discrepancies through "massive redistribution, artificial competitive boosts to the less naturally gifted, and so forth." This attempt to level the playing field creates a whole host of problems. What is the traditionalist response? Beer quotes Wendell Berry essentially agreeing with Charles Murray. Berry:

Young people are told, "You can be anything you want to be." Every student is given to understand that he or she is being prepared for "leadership." All of this is a lie. ...You can't be everything you want to be; nobody can. Everybody can't be a leader; not everybody even wants to be. And these lies are not innocent. They lead to disappointment. They lead good young people to think that if they have an ordinary job, if they work with their hands, if they are farmers or housewives or mechanics or carpenters, they are no good."

A couple of thoughts came to mind as I read this. First, Educational Romanticism, born as it was out of a spirit of equalitarianism, will not go quietly. Larry Summers found that out the hard way when he suggested that innate differences in aptitude may explain the dearth of women in high positions in the hard sciences. Very, very many people have a vested interest in maintaining the fiction that we are all equal to one another in ability and talent and everything else, including pretty much the entire institutionalized schooling system, nearly all of the political left, and not a few on the political right.

Second, I think that secular society as a whole will have significant problems dealing with the death of this fiction from a moral and ethical standpoint. Since equality simply doesn't exist, the fictitious veneer of equality is being slowly abandoned by Left and Right; since secularists cannot base a belief system on a superstitious belief in a god, the only thing that remains is to base a value system on one's merit, on what one produces, on one's talent. In other words, the system becomes a meritocracy, the antithesis of Romanticized culture, where all are parsed and ranked by order of achievement. Those that promote a pure meritocracy as "natural and just"--the Thomas Friedmans of the world--haven't thought through the devastating implications of that ideological position on the remainder of their political philosophy, or to their notions of social justice, for that matter.

I can only imagine the political rugby scrum that will result when the tools used to assign a person's place in the hierarchy merit are debated. We've already seen a preview of it with the still-roiling debates over SAT scores and IQs vs race and ethnicity. It will also be interesting to watch what happens to these former Romantic adherents when they are faced with the inevitable logical consequences of a meritocracy: some people will be superior to others for no other reason than their innate qualities and for the accident of birth class.

I think a meritocracy will ruthlessly reinforce (and enforce) the stratification of class. It will discriminate based on family formation, with those from intact families valued more than those from broken homes since they will perform better, be less troublesome, and have more educational achievement. Moreover, if you believe Watson, Herrnstein, and Murray, the meritocracy will also discriminate based on race and ethnicity, since some have shown that some races/ethnicities have superior IQs than others. And that will be a bitter pill for adherents to the "everyone's equal" maxim. Thus, Jefferson's dream of an "aristocracy of talent" will be realized, unfortunately as it fuses with the Old World-style aristocracy based on social class.

Thus, the $100,000 question for secularists is posed by Dreher:

If socialism is not only unjust, but a foolish way to organize one's society and economy, does that imply that pure capitalist meritocracy is the most just, smartest way to organize one's society and economy?

While those of Faith will have little difficulty answering this question, it will be quite problematic for secularists. Without Faith, the faithless in a capitalist system will have no alternative but to base their evaluations of human worth on a person's ability to produce, which is inextricably linked to class, intelligence, education, and race. We've seen the results of the secularist's disastrous foray down that road 90 years ago in Russia, 70 years ago in Germany, and 60 years ago in China.

I wonder if history will repeat itself.

Fat Chance...

...that I'll be swindled into purchasing a gift for my ex wife this Mother's Day. Check out these tactics--how underhanded can one be?:

On behalf of my four-year-old, who has a Yahoo account in her name, I recently sent an e-mail to her father, who lives in Alberta.

"Hi Daddy," I typed, as my daughter was fast asleep. "Mommy has been talking about Mother's Day. I only have 143 pennies in my piggy bank. She's the best mommy ever. She's been pretty exhausted. I'd like to get her something nice. Can you help? Love you."

All mothers of young children rely on gifts made by someone else. For the single mom, feeling the need for something more than a crumpled card in a knapsack - something that comes with a gift receipt - presents a particular dilemma. You can't very well hand over $20 to your three year-old to do your shopping. So some have learned to lobby on their own behalf.

"I've drilled it into him," says Toronto-based Vanessa Craft, the author of Out of Character, about her three-year-old daughter's father, who lives in England. "Her dad knows to make me cards, at the very least, on behalf of our daughter," says Ms. Craft, adding, "I've never had a bad Mother's Day being a single mom."

As for me, the e-mail worked. I'll be at a spa, thanks to my four-year-old's request via her mother's e-mail.

Holy cow. First, what four year old has their own Yahoo email account? Second, the chutzpah of this woman is staggering... impersonating your four year old daughter so that you can wheedle some baubles from the very same man you kicked out of your and you daughter's life.

Wow.

Today's Quote-ocity

"The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools"

—Thucydides

Enter the Child-Woman. Not Metaphorically, But Really

It's official. After years of complaining about how rape, sexual harassment laws, and divorce laws treat women as if they were children and men as if they were beasts, one of the MRA set's worst fears have been realized: now women (but not men) are considered incapable of consenting to sex if they are tipsy. While I realize that the task of determining consent is difficult on the continuum of progressively more intense inebriation on the part of both the accuser and the accused, the implications of this legal trend in Australia (and here in the States) is, well, sobering:

The new laws say that if a woman is "substantially affected" by alcohol, she may lack the capacity to consent to sex even if she says "yes" to sex. More disturbing, even if a man honestly believes consent was given, his state of mind is now irrelevant. Now, the man is effectively deemed to have knowledge of lack of consent if there are no reasonable grounds for believing consent was given. And it gets worse. When asked to determine whether the man had no reasonable grounds for believing the woman gave consent, the jury must ignore the fact that the man was drunk [emphasis added]. In other words, the fact that the woman who says "yes" to sex is drunk is highly relevant: it may vitiate her consent. But the man's intoxication must be ignored when working out whether he had "reasonable grounds" for believing consent was given. It is a curious law that says alcohol only affects the cognitive abilities of women.

These new rape laws degrade women. They treat them as helpless victims, stripping them of the power to make decisions about sex after consuming alcohol. Down a few too many Bacardi Breezers, and the law says you are no longer responsible for your actions. Is this really the message we want to send to young women?

Why is this happening? Lawyers point to the perfect storm. The intoxicated man is trapped between a strident but misguided feminist agenda and the law and order lobby driven by perceptions that rape conviction rates are too low. In reality, the low conviction rates reflect nothing more than the reasonable doubt that arises when, absent other evidence about an alleged crime in private, a woman claims rape and a man claims sex was consensual.

Yes, this is precisely the answer that feminists want to send young women. See, it's all about empowerment, but without the responsibility. Authority without the accountability. Men are considered by all to be adults, responsible for their actions. This law sets them up to be preyed upon by reckless, hormonal, emotional children masquerading as women in adult female bodies. To quoth Austin Powers, "it is a very groovy time" to be a woman in the West-do whatcha want, send someone else the bill.

Also, as far as the low conviction rates are concerned, it's not just reasonable doubt on the part of juries that results in low conviction rates. I submit that it's the simple fact that nearly half of rape accusations are false would also have a substantial suppressive effect on conviction rates. If the accuser recants, or is caught in a lie, that tends to have a significant effect on the prosecution's case.
Moreover, many rape charges are dropped for lack of sufficient evidence to convict; perhaps that should be factored in to the calculus too.

Brothers, you need to protect yourself. If you see a hot 20-year old coed at the bar with an immodest outfit and 'come-on' demeanor-in other words, wearing a hooker's uniform--just replace her image in your mind with a petulant 13 year old girl with no discipline, no sense of justice, and an itchy, litigious trigger finger. And the law will back up her word, not yours. Run away, my brothers.

Perhaps it is better for you to play Call of Duty 4 on your Xbox or immerse yourself in a MMPORG than to risk everything by consorting with the female of the species on anything but the most commercial of terms. If you must seek female companionship, good women are out there, but it's getting darned hard to find them.

Book Review: The Garbage Generation

The Book: The Garbage Generation, by Daniel Amneus.

Note: This review was performed on the version I found online, which may be found by clicking here.

The Gist: "Garbage Generation" refers to the characteristics of the generations of adults who matriculate from matriarchal families without a biological father in the home. This book starts by citing a familiar statistic, that female-headed (i.e. matriarchal) households have an extraordinarily high correlation with crime, impoverishment, educational failure, male and female promiscuity, and disruptive behavior. These households represent a sociological regression toward a default, if inferior, model of social organization that cannot sustain an advanced, complex society--matriarchy.

Amneus makes no bones about it: it is patriarchy which makes advanced complex civilization possible, and matriarchy makes it regress to its most basic, Stone Age form:

Prior to [patriarchy], mankind had to muddle through the million years of the Stone Age with the female-headed reproductive arrangements of the ghetto, the barnyard and the rain forest...and on Indian reservations and in surviving Stone Age societies

In an argument that reminded me distinctly of Jared Diamond's main thesis in Guns Germs and Steel, Amneus claims that societies that developed the technology of patriarchy became more efficient, more wealthy, more prosperous, more fecund, and, over time, more dominant over the matriarchal "goddess" societies that surrounded them. The mechanism that patriarchy promotes and protects is the involvement of fathers with their children, and the cultural and social blessings that result. On the other hand, matriarchy, a more primitive form of societal organization, deprives men of loyalty to a particular woman and her children, to their families, of having a stake in society. As a result, matriarchal societies are, as a rule, poorer and grubbier and more violent than patriarchal ones. That very few matriarchal societies exist today is a testament to the superiority of patriarchy as a social organizational model.

As Amneus explains it, a key feature of patriarchal societies is a "sexual contract" of sorts between men and women. Like any contract, this sexual constitution imposes reciprocal duties and obligations, in this case the sexual regulation of women to their husband and the economic regulation of men to their wives. This two-way contract is the crucial underpinning of the technological advance of Patriarchy--men offer women the promise of security and covering in exchange for women accepting the regulation of their baser sexual impulses--i.e. monogamy. This regulation was an important point for Amneus--female promiscuity and polyandry, while de rigeur in matriarchal families, threatens the very existence of civilization.

The regulation of women's sexuality provided assurance to men that children born are theirs--promiscuity/polyandry being antithetical to male involvement in childrens' lives--and that men would not be denied access those children in the future.

The development of this contract meant that patriarchal societies were better able to include men in the societal franchise. As a consequence, those societies were able to lift themselves out of the muck and mire of the state of nature, and their citizens live lives that weren't quite so nasty, brutish, and short. It was patriarchy that, by providing incentives in the form of a statutorily protected connection to his children (which Amneus calls the Legitimacy Principle), incentivized and harnessed men's energies and channelled it into socially useful directions, namely the creation of wealth and the transmission of same to their progeny. Without the connection to his family guaranteed by patriarchy, the incentives for men to work and generate wealth disappear, and men's innate energy dissipates, or worse, used for counter-productive ends. Prosperity is replaced by poverty, and peace is replaced by crime. A woman's connection to her children is a biological fact; a man's connection to his children is a social invention, a weak link that must be protected if society is to capitalize on the contribution of men. As it stands today, that link is not protected--rather, the inverse is true: the strongest link is reinforced--and men's involvement in society has been steadily declining as a result, their energies dissipated into non-fruitful pursuits.

While the superiority of patriarchy over matriarchy is the primary theme of Amneus' book, he also addresses factors that work to undermine patriarchy and produce the "garbage generation". One of those factors, unsurprisingly, is feminism. Amneus compares and contrasts two variants of feminism: "sleeping beauty feminism"--or 1st wave feminism, and "slaughtered saints feminism", which is 2d wave and later. In the former variant of feminism, feminists such as Freidan exhorted women to give up their comfortable--she uses the term "parasitic"--but regulated life and exchange it for the less secure, freer life where they would be responsible for themselves and the choices they make.

Apparently this bargain, an exchange of a free ride for something that would cost, didn't convince enough women to join the struggle to overturn patriarchy, so "sleeping beauty" feminism quickly gave way to "slaughtered saints" feminism. This variant of feminism focuses on how the the innocent, victimized woman is predated upon by vicious men, who oppresses her and cages her and violates her. In order to convince women to shrug off their comfortable-but-restricted life, this feminism trotted out breathtaking misandrist agitprop. In an instant, the image of the upright and honorable husband who sacrificed his life for his family was converted into a rampaging beast who rapes his wife fortnightly and beats his children.

One major difference between the two feminisms that,unlike "sleeping beauty" feminism, "slaughtered saints" feminism rejected the first-wave emphasis on personal responsibility as a hallmark of independence. No, the new "independent" feminist was a poor victim who depended upon the chivalry--that is, benevolent sexism--of the larger society to escape her personal hell. In this way, the feminists leveraged the protective, covering instincts of patriarchal culture against itself. The patriarchy chivalrously but self-destructively permitted the "slaughtered saints" feminist to to retain an entitlement to a man's resources even as the man himself was kicked to the curb. She was able to withdraw her contractual commitment, while pocketing his via what Amneus calls the "mutilated beggar" device--through her divorce action, she intentionally makes herself (and the children) to be poor and destitute and thus in need of his support, despite her ability to support herself.

Marriage had been twisted from an institution within which to raise children, to one whose function was to provide women with ex-husbands so that they can be "independent" with their brood, sans men. Thus, the sexual contract that underpinned patriarchy had been broken, and the shock of it reverberates throughout our society with nearly one million divorces--divorces that strip men of their children and their rights--each year:

the Seneca Falls feminists complained...that women were moral minors with whom contracts--including marriage--were worth nothing because they could renege on them if they wished. Such irresponsibility justified the pro-male tilt of the law. 19th century men needed the pro-male tilt--and so do men today. The 19th century husband was empowered to take his wife's children from her, but he didn't. Today's wife is empowered to take her husband's children from him and she does in millions of marriages, and the marriages in which her right is not exercised are de-stabilized by the knowledge that it could be exercised if the wife chooses...the legal system [was turned on its head and] deprives husbands of virtually all rights and reduces ex-husbands to literal slavery

But it's not just the men who suffer from women's fickle behavior. Amneus cites author Mary Ann Mason, whose book The Equality Trap notes that the condition of women themselves and their children has been getting bleaker and bleaker with the destruction of (patriarchal) marriage, and that women have learned that they cannot depend upon the permanence of marriage to provide the requisite environment within which to raise children. So they work for their economic security and have fewer children, if at all. Perhaps it is this instability of marriage, and not female employment, which is responsible for falling fertility rates in cultures that have rejected patriarchy in favor of the more primitive matriarchy.

Amneus highlights another factor that undermines civilization, and that is sexual autonomy, also known as the "Promiscuity Principle", also known as the "First Law of Matriarchy". At its core, this principle implies that women control reproduction, and that women can copulate with whomever they please. This principle also directly threatens the secure role of the male in the family. It harkens back to the more savage days of human existence when both men and women joined with whomever whenever, and men could never be certain if children born to a woman were theirs. The promiscuity principle is the bedrock of a matriarchy...the only bond that counts is the biological one between mother and child; the social one between father and child is obliterated before it has a chance to exist. As a result the sexually unregulated woman makes a poor, even risky, marriage partner for any man who is interested in a family; and by extension, her lack of regulation is more likely to detract from social progress and order than to enhance it. In short, in rejecting sexual regulation, in embracing her inner libertine, she is poisons the well of civilization.

Yet another factor that Amneus discusses that undermines patriarchy and civilization is the practice of appropriating men's property and giving it to their ex wives as a reward for their divorcing him. In effect, he is pressed into the service of the matriarchy against his will, he is subsidizing the destruction of the very civilization that birthed him. Amneus states that if civilization is to survive, men must regain control of their bodies; if women renege on their part of the sexual contract, then men should be able to withdraw their promises of support and breadwinning as well. Amneus dismisses feminist arguments that ex-wives are entitled to alimony, since wives are in effect "paid" by their husbands while they are in the marriage. Same with child support: Amneus contends that children should be awarded to the parent most able to support them; not to the one that is least able to do so. Otherwise, the heavy hand of government enslaves the breadwinner to subsidize his own irrelevance. Divorce, Amneus claims, would virtually disappear if women had to leave both the comfort of their husband's provision and their children behind. Such was the state prior to 1900, when children were awarded to men, and divorce was rare. Alas, this is not the case: women today get to keep their ex-husband's provision and take the children, along with the fiscal gravy train that comes with them. Little wonder then that divorce is rampant. Perfidy is rewarded with a payday. As Amneus quipped earlier, the purpose of marriage is to provide women with ex-husbands.

The Quote:"[T]he patriarchal system...made civilization possible--the artificial, fragile patriarchal arrangement designed to elevate male sperm- providers into fathers and to allow them an equal share in human reproduction. It is the purpose of the feminist/sexual revolution to do away with this man made superstructure built on the foundation of female reproductive biology and to restore the original mammalian/matrilineal arrangement"

The Good: The book is a great primer on why patriarchy is civilization, and to attack patriarchy is to labor to re-install a primitive family model that is unable to support a complex society.

The Bad: Lots of claims and "facts", but only Chapter 1 is sourced. Also, the book becomes repetitive after a while--the author could have conveyed the same message in half the words. Also, the book is dated...it was written in 1990 and shows it. Lastly, the author advocates breadwinning as the sole social role for men, yet does not sufficiently address the disadvantages and downside risks of this role.

The Verdict: Veteran MRAs and FRAs will find nothing new here, just a rehash of what we already know. But noobs and young men and boys will find it worth the read.

The Recommendation: Recommended for those who hear the word Patriarchy being used as an epithet but don't know the reason why, or why a patriarchy is essential to our modern existence.