Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary

Does the education system discriminate against boys?

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Check out this article from MercatorNet, about the plight of boys stuck in the feminized public schools.

Excerpt:

Men are now lagging women in every major category from lifestyle to health, from education to employment. For instance, on the health and lifestyle front, men are involved in twice as many fatal auto accidents as women. Good-bye to all those jokes about women drivers. Currently the US has 1.5 million men in the slammer, a 15 to 1 lead over the fairer sex. We guys are much more likely to be alcoholics and we are ahead in the obesity derby. No surprise, then, that on average women have a five-year lead in life span.

For decades now, feminists have been decrying the salary deferential that men have enjoyed. Perhaps this is so for men in their 40s and 50s, but no longer for the 20-something crowd. The playing field is now level, with the advantage held by the women when it is time to tighten the corporate belt and lay-offs occur. As our recession/depression deepens, bosses are laying off young male employees at a greater rate than young women. This employment data corresponds to staggering statistics showing that across the country girls and young women are dramatically out-schooling their male counterparts. Last September 58 percent of the entering freshman class at the nation’s colleges and universities was female.

However, not only is there a large gap in favor of women’s college attendance, but women go through college faster, with higher grades, more honors and fewer disciplinary setbacks. Currently, they are being admitted to elite graduate business and medical schools in greater numbers.

Other topics:

  • men’s apathy due to getting sex from women without having to prove themselves
  • the lack of fathers (caused by no-fault divorce and welfare programs)
  • the lack of male teachers in schools
  • the lack of male role models in the feminized curriculum
  • parents spending too much on video games and other distractions

This is a must-read for anyone who cares about men.

Other articles by this author

Books I am reading about education

Education Myths: What Special Interest Groups Want You to Believe About Our Schools – And Why It Isn’t So
by Jay P. Greene

The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education
by Peter Brimelow

The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men
by Christina Hoff Sommers

Commentary

Science Daily: Co-habiting before marriage is a bad idea

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Story from Science Daily. This is old news, but maybe it will be new news to some of my readers.

Excerpt:

University of Denver (DU) researchers find that couples who live together before they are engaged have a higher chance of getting divorced than those who wait until they are married to live together, or at least wait until they are engaged. In addition, couples who lived together before engagement and then married, reported a lower satisfaction in their marriages.

…”Cohabiting to test a relationship turns out to be associated with the most problems in relationships,” Rhoades says. “Perhaps if a person is feeling a need to test the relationship, he or she already knows some important information about how a relationship may go over time.”

This is why I love chastity. Chastity is like the fine-tuning argument – you can’t lose the argument because you have all the evidence. Your opponent has unobservables hopes and dreams. And these moral rules like chastity are not just there to protect you from harm. Chastity allows you to relate to the opposite sex in ways you’d never dreamed of. And it works on people you aren’t even attracted to, as well!

Isn’t it interesting how disdainful we seem to have become of traditional wisdom in regards to sexual matters? As if  civilization worked one way for thousands of years, and then all of a sudden the feminists tell us how human nature really works.

Check out this article from Focus on the Family.

Excerpt:

Researchers from Pennsylvania State University find “it has been consistently shown that, compared to spouses who did not cohabit, spouses who cohabit before marriage have higher rates of marital separation and divorce.”3 Sociologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison report, “Recent national studies in Canada, Sweden, and the United States found that cohabitation increased, rather than decreased, the risk of marital dissolution.”4 This was also found to be true in the Netherlands.5

A leading researcher on cohabitation from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, reports:

Contrary to conventional wisdom that living together before marriage will screen out poor matches and therefore improve subsequent marital stability, there is considerable empirical evidence demonstrating that premarital cohabitation is associated with lowered marital stability.6

Additional researchers found, “cohabitation is not related to marital happiness, but is related to lower levels of marital interaction, higher levels of marital disagreement and marital instability.”7 They conclude, “On the basis of the analysis provided so far, we must reject that argument that cohabitation provides superior training for marriage or improves mate-selection.”8

Research conducted at Yale and Columbia University and published in American Sociological Review found:

The overall association between premarital cohabitation and subsequent marital stability is striking. The dissolution rate of women who cohabit premaritally with their future spouse is, on average, nearly 80 percent higher than the rate of those who do not.

Other studies show that those who have any type of pre-marital cohabiting experience have a 50 to 100 percent greater likelihood of divorce than those who do not cohabit premaritally.10 This data has led researchers to conclude that the enhanced chance of divorce after cohabitation “is beginning to take on the status of an empirical generalization.”11

Marriage is not for people who are “in love”. And having things in common is not the most important thing either. What you need are two people who are trained and experienced in making commitments to do arduous, long-running tasks. People who come into a marriage thinking it will solve all their problems are crazy. And children make it even more stressful!

UPDATE: Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse podcast on the subject is here. (11 minutes)

Commentary

Sarah Palin crushes cap-and-trade in the Washington Post

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Sarah Palin’s op-ed in the Washington Post is called “The ‘Cap And Tax’ Dead End”. (H/T Watts Up With That, Gateway Pundit, Stop the ACLU)

Excerpt:

American prosperity has always been driven by the steady supply of abundant, affordable energy. Particularly in Alaska, we understand the inherent link between energy and prosperity, energy and opportunity, and energy and security. Consequently, many of us in this huge, energy-rich state recognize that the president’s cap-and-trade energy tax would adversely affect every aspect of the U.S. economy.

There is no denying that as the world becomes more industrialized, we need to reform our energy policy and become less dependent on foreign energy sources. But the answer doesn’t lie in making energy scarcer and more expensive! Those who understand the issue know we can meet our energy needs and environmental challenges without destroying America’s economy.

Job losses are so certain under this new cap-and-tax plan that it includes a provision accommodating newly unemployed workers from the resulting dried-up energy sector, to the tune of $4.2 billion over eight years. So much for creating jobs.

In addition to immediately increasing unemployment in the energy sector, even more American jobs will be threatened by the rising cost of doing business under the cap-and-tax plan. For example, the cost of farming will certainly increase, driving down farm incomes while driving up grocery prices. The costs of manufacturing, warehousing and transportation will also increase.

The ironic beauty in this plan? Soon, even the most ardent liberal will understand supply-side economics.

…The Americans hit hardest will be those already struggling to make ends meet. As the president eloquently puts it, their electricity bills will “necessarily skyrocket.” So much for not raising taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year.

Even Warren Buffett, an ardent Obama supporter, admitted that under the cap-and-tax scheme, “poor people are going to pay a lot more for electricity.”

Meh. It’s merely excellent. Somewhat superlative.

Not nearly as good as Michele Bachmann could do, and Michele is conservative on vouchers and illegal immigration, unlike Sarah. See, Sarah writes about supply-side economics once in a while, but Michele gives passionate speeches about supply-side economics every day:

And Michele likes Christian apologetics more than Sarah! Sarah probably doesn’t even know who William Lane Craig is! Michele should be President, Sarah can be Secretary of Energy.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air comments on Sarah’s article:

We need to make all of this clear.  Cap-and-trade rations energy production, which means there will be less of it for a long time.  Alternatives are not ready for the kind of mass production that would allow a complete replacement of energy, and probably won’t be for decades, if ever in some cases (notably wind power, as GreenChoice showed and as T. Boone Pickens finally realized).  That means a lower standard of living that will impact America regressively, with the lowest income earners getting hit the hardest.  The drain on the economy from high energy prices means less jobs and higher retail prices for goods and services, again a regressive consequence of energy rationing.

Obama and his Utopian allies promise that government will help close the gap by offering more services to the unemployed and the poor at the expense of the “rich”.  What will that do?  It will further handicap the economy by keeping capital out of the markets.  Even worse, it will vastly expand the dependent class in America who have to go on the dole to survive.  And many of those ardent liberals will be pretty happy with that outcome, too.

We need to stop this thing. It’s good that Sarah came out against it.