This is just a round-up of a few issues that that will be of interest to those who would like to learn more about the challenges facing men today. These articles are all from this week.
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.
NEA General Counsel Bob Chanin tells the world the top priority of the largest teacher union in the USA.
Are they concerned with providing a quality education for our children?
Here is the video:
And the transcript:
Despite what some among us would like to believe it is not because of our creative ideas; it is not because of the merit of our positions; it is not because we care about children; and it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child.
The NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power. And we have power because there are more than 3.2 million people who are willing to pay us hundreds of million of dollars in dues each year because they believe that we are the unions that can most effectively represent them; the union that can protect their rights and advance their interests as education employees.
This is not to say that the concern of NEA and its affiliates with closing achievement gaps, reducing drop rate rates, improving teacher quality, and the like are unimportant or inappropriate. To the contrary these are the goals that guide the work we do. But they need not and must not be achieved at the expense of due process, employee rights, or collective bargaining.
That is simply too high a price to pay.
The Heritage Foundation notes that union dues are not voluntarily in many parts of the USA.
First of all, there is little that is voluntary about the millions in dues paid to the NEA every year. The NEA is strongest in states without right to work laws, and if you want to teach in a public school that is under an NEA contract in those jurisdictions (like California and New York), you must pay dues to the NEA. It is the law. There is nothing voluntary about it. Second, that is tax payer money he’s talking about, which is exactly what is so corrupting about public sector unions: the government is lobbying itself for its own expansion.
And what happens when you value the rights of incompetent teachers ahead of the rights of parents and children?
It is very important to note that he gets a standing ovation from the teachers present at the convention. These are the people who teach your children. Or rather, these are the people who want to indoctrinate your children to accept their values, and to be paid by you for doing it.
Sometime last year, while negotiating a teacher contract for the KIPP Ujima Village charter middle school in Baltimore, founder Jason Botel pointed out that his students, mostly from low-income families, had earned the city’s highest public school test scores three years in a row. If the union insisted on increasing overtime pay, he said, the school could not afford the extra instruction time that was a key to its success, and student achievement would suffer.
Botel says a union official replied: “That’s not our problem.”
Such stories heat the blood of union critics. It is, they contend, a sign of how unions dumb down public education by focusing on salaries, not learning.
They don’t care about your children’s education or career.