1. James Pethokoukis on the welfare cliff – the point at which single mothers are incentivized to maintain a lower income in order to qualify for government benefits. I had a conversation yesterday with a guy I work with whose wife isn’t going back to work after the birth of their child because they’d lose their food stamps and Section 8. Whatever makes them happy, right?
2. Via Roosh and Oz Conservative, President Obama wrote an op-ed to Newsweek celebrating Title IX. Money shot:
In fact, more women as a whole now graduate from college than men. This is a great accomplishment—not just for one sport or one college or even just for women but for America. And this is what Title IX is all about.
Cool, a 57%-43% split is a great accomplishment. Got it. Republicans chase back and forth trying to nail Obama down using all sorts of gimmicks – this disparity and Obama’s aloof comments on the topic are the perfect example of everything that conservatives should be combating Obama on. Obama talks up the transparency of his administration, but I’ll be damned if I can get Russlynn Ali, a lawyer in the admin’s Office of Civil Rights, or anyone else to respond to my queries on this topic. A low level blogger like myself has to do it since nobody else will.
3. Jezebel on men using their children’s sporting events to escape household chores. Does anyone ever ask this question: who cares more about the state of the domicile? Do men care nearly as much as women do that the dishes are perfectly washed and dried and put away? Feminists complain about household choreload but pretend that men are cracking the whip to get women to do them. Men kinda care about chores but not all that much.
4. Slate must be contractually obligated to fellate the TV show Louie while performing cunnilingus on Girls because they’ve not once admitted when episodes from either show are a dud as was last night’s Louie episode. David Haglund calls the episode “riveting and delightful”. I judge a comedy on this metric: how much I laugh. And I only laughed at the gimmicky stand-up portion of last night’s episode which was about Louie’s man crush on a Miami-based beach life guard who ends up believing that Louie is gay after Louie stays an extra couple of days at his hotel after striking up a friendship with the life guard. At the end, the life guard leaves believing that Louie is gay because Louie is unable to actually come out and say that he is straight. This comedic device – the bumbling, stumbling, incoherent conversation which ultimately involves no actual complete sentences but leads to mass confusion and a distorted truth – is played out and below CK’s pay grade, but he keeps relying on it in his shows and nobody will say that it isn’t entertaining, because it’s art or something.
5. Kids near Detroit can’t read and that’s the school system’s fault so the ACLU is suing them. (h/t Grerp)
Like this:
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“What about the argument that we must keep taxes on the rich low lest we remove their incentive to create wealth? The answer is that we have a lot of historical evidence … and none of it supports the view that … tax-rate changes … currently on the table … would have any major effect on incentives
Furthermore, if you’re really concerned about the incentive effects of public policy, you should be focused … on workers making $20,000 to $30,000 a year, who are often penalized for any gain in income because they end up losing means-tested benefits like Medicaid and food stamps.”
Also, Sax cites college ratio figures that are way out of balance, but still closer than reality. Independent studies (not those generated by the education industry) place the college undergraduate ratio at around 63-64 to 37-36 in favor of women, mainly by including well over 100 private mostly women’s liberal arts colleges. There is also a rapidly rising predominance of women in postgraduate schools, including law and medical schools. Complicating such figures is the really huge number of foreign schooled students (over 750,000), mostly male, who come to American colleges and universities every year to study and do research.
https://invincibleprobity.wordpress.com/2011/04/10/more-on-dumb-american-men/
http://invincibleprobity.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/americas-greatest-social-shame/
and then this:
The American “education” industry has been using the “uni-sex” approach since the late-1990s to conceal just how badly that industry has been failing to educate boys by burying their poor performance beneath the high performance of girls in all its reporting to the public, in all its submission of statistics to international bodies dealing with childhood education. If US school statistics reported performance by gender, it would be clear that girls now rate at the top of world class, while boys fall somewhere in the middle of the Third World. But it’s not a problem if no one knows about it, is it?
http://invincibleprobity.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/a-society-with-only-one-gender/
I am not sure of the last.
Dr. G, why didn’t you attribute that quote to Krugman as you should have?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/opinion/krugman-whos-very-important.html?ref=opinion
““What about the argument that we must keep taxes on the rich low lest we remove their incentive to create wealth?”
Any talk of The Rich as job-creators is incomplete without any talk of them as also being Externalities-Bringers. Namely, I’m in agreement with Half Sigma’s recent arguments about the social liabilities associated with the rich: on one end, in pricing out the middle class, and on the other end as amassing an entourage of NAM servant-armies.
Also, children of the very wealthy are utterly disconnected from realities of middle-class struggle and they form a hostile elite. Trustafarians are overrepresented among antifas and OWSers.
Over time, I’ve strongly changed my view from a laissez-faire one with regards to the very wealthy, to one that favors caps (in one form or another) on upper-end wealth.
Whorefinder weeps.
Why single-sex education is spreading across the US
An estimated 500 public schools across the US now offer some all-boy and all-girl classrooms. But the American Civil Liberties Union is involved in a battle against single-sex learning.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2012/0708/Why-single-sex-education-is-spreading-across-the-US
Single-Sex Public Schools Increases Sexism — Not Learning
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hayley-krischer/single-sex-public-schools_b_1659719.html
LOL!! America is a fucking insane asylum.
Namely, I’m in agreement with Half Sigma’s recent arguments about the social liabilities associated with the rich: on one end, in pricing out the middle class, and on the other end as amassing an entourage of NAM servant-armies.
Has it ever been different? The loyalty that many peasants feel towards royalty may well be due to the fact that they mostly interact with and struggle against the middle classes, not the upper classes.
The American “education” industry has been using the “uni-sex” approach since the late-1990s to conceal just how badly that industry has been failing to educate boys by burying their poor performance beneath the high performance of girls in all its reporting to the public
It is clear that the majority of women study economically worthless subjects during their college years. However, their attendance improves GDP (through increased government spending) and fuels the education monster (that will explode soon, I think).
So, a confluence of interests can be expected to try to keep things going. Pretty soon the qualification you will need to attend college is that you can fog a mirror.
Perhaps more insidious (and economically damaging) will be Title IX applied to STEM subjects. Of course, from a personal point of view, since I am already in the industry I can look forward to my value increasing.
The tendency of more women to study liberal arts also leads to more grade inflation for women. I did my bachelors in ME, masters in materials science. My SO did her bachelors in french, masters in library science. Her GPAs were higher than mine, but I did far more work. But the statistics in MSM articles just note my SO’s nominal education level is equal to mine, but her pay is lower, which then gets spun as a workplace equal-pay issue for which the fix is more government help for women.
I’m wary of what the socialists will come up with regarding STEM also. Lately Slate has been running the standard articles about it, bemoaning low percentages of women and trying to find ways to blame it on social constructs. They haven’t gotten around to the “big government should spend money to compensate women for years of patriarchy in STEM” part yet, but they’ll get their narrative together at some point. Non-STEM educated feminists see this as the last frontier in the educational segment of their quest to declare The End Of Men, and they want the box checked off. Funny how the women engineers they quote in those articles seem to think it a much less serious problem than the End of Men’ers writing the articles.
There is a phrase I would never have expected to be used… ever. Great minds think alike, I suppose.
Finally… someone looking out for the children! Detroit’s just got to stop with all its tax breaks for the rich and huge corporate welfare development projects.
“Does anyone ever ask this question: who cares more about the state of the domicile? Do men care nearly as much as women do that the dishes are perfectly washed and dried and put away? Feminists complain about household choreload but pretend that men are cracking the whip to get women to do them. Men kinda care about chores but not all that much.”
I couldn’t disagree with you more, but then you are young, single and raised in the entitlement era.
A mature man cares about his environment (think about your image of a wood shop/garage- are they chaotic crapholes or is everything in its place?)
I have noticed that women are the ones most likely to put away a dirty pot or pan rather than scrub it shiny, or stack bowls large on small rather than nesting them properly or to forgo G.I.ing toilets in favor of placing throw rugs and shams around to distract from the deep dirt.
I sense that modern women don’t care about any type of work, be it scholastic, corporate, industrial, or menial, it’s all beneath them. They send kids off to day care or hire an au pair, insist on sharing duties with husbands or hire maids, etc. Much like PE standards in the military, in order to promote equality, standards for women must be lowered.
“Kids near Detroit can’t read and that’s the school system’s fault so the ACLU is suing them. (h/t Grerp)”
…..
The school district is Highland Park, just outside Detroit. Highland Park was the site of Henry Ford’s original Model T factory. Back in the 1920′s, the town boomed, it’s population peaking at around 53,000 in the early 1930′s. Here are some facts about Highland Park:
Current population – approximately 12,000 (roughly 30% decline since 2000)
Unemployment rate – 22%
Per capita income (2009) – $11,132 (fourth lowest in Michigan)
Black population – 94%
Average teacher salary – $51,000 (Michigan – $58,000; US – $55,000)
Average per pupil expenditure (2009-2010) – $7,936 (Michigan – $11,750; US – $11,841)
Single parent households – 1,267
Two parent households – 441
So you get the picture. The ACLU is suing the school district under section 380.1278 of the Michigan Compiled Laws, passed in 1976, which states:
(8) Excluding special education pupils, pupils having a learning disability, and pupils with extenuating circumstances as determined by school officials, a pupil who does not score satisfactorily on the 4th or 7th grade Michigan educational assessment program reading test shall be provided special assistance reasonably expected to enable the pupil to bring his or her reading skills to grade level within 12 months.
….
This is a nice slice of happy-think, an unfunded mandate from the Michigan legislature to local school districts. The act doesn’t specify where bankrupt districts such as Highland Park are supposed to get the money to provide special assistance. But not to fear. In February, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder signed a bailout bill for Highland Park:
House Bill 4445 includes $4 million to be used as $4,000 per-pupil stipends that follow students currently enrolled in Highland Park schools. Money from the Distressed District Student Transition grants can go to another school district or a charter school that accepts Highland Park students, or if the student remains in Highland Park schools, the money must go to the operating entity that is brought in to run the school. The money will not be used for the Highland Park district itself.
“This temporary measure keeps Highland Park children in the classroom, where they deserve and need to be,” Snyder said. “While this action does not solve the school district’s financial and management situation, it does put the immediate needs of students and their families first by minimizing disruptions for the rest of this school year. There is still much work to do but this collaborative effort shows that we can rise to any challenge and find appropriate solutions. I applaud Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville and House Speaker Jase Bolger for their leadership, and commend those legislators who put differences aside and acted in the best interests of Highland Park children.”
Despite repeated state advances and bailouts, including a $4 million hardship loan last summer and two advancements of state aid payments in the past month, it is expected that the school district will not be able to meet today’s payroll.
…
Snyder, Bolger and Richardville are all Republicans, by the way. The plan is to eventually convert the district to all charter schools, which may be the best solution. The article about the lawsuit does contain the mandatory whining complaint by a parent that the schools haven’t yet taught her daughter (in the 11th grade) how to read! I think that speaks for itself. Clearly Highland Park has a money problem (largely because the tax base has evaporated), but I don’t think money alone will fix the situation.
hardscrabble,
poor reading comprehension on your part. i wrote that men “kinda care about chores but not all that much” and i directly mentioned dishes and what-not, not the shop or the garage which might be tidy but is utilitarian i.e. not neurotically, sparkingly clean. if my observations are correct, men, on average, prefer tidiness and a reasonable level of cleanliness and utility compared to women who are more apt to desire a ridiculous (and, imo, pointless) level of cleanliness. men do a quick run through and straighten things up; women are more apt to do the deep, deep clean which us men tend not to give two shits about doing.
i’d then ask from where you draw your “sense” of the way modern women are?
@hardscrabble farmer:
From my own experience, men care about doing things right when doing them halfassed would cause them later work. Just as an example, I always wash my pots and pans immediately after cooking a meal, simply because procrastinating on that simple task makes the later job 10x more difficult. If a guy is very particular about something in his environment, it’s probably because he’s learned from experience that not doing something a certain way leads to later difficulties. This is the male problem-solving mentality at work. Women seem much less mindful about how they perform the same tasks.
Did it ever occur to all of the “gender inequity of household chores” whiners that most men feel like the woman in “Sleeping with the Enemy” on this issue? If women are going to be so irrational and maniacal about such things, let them do it. And if they want men to do more of it, they have to accept the way the men do it, which tends to be more rational as it relates to diminishing returns. Of course, you won’t find them crawling under the house to fix a leak or going up into the attic to fix the air condioner or heater. Or fixing a leaking pipe in the wall, or mowing the lawn, or replacing the damaged drywall, or fixing the wiring, or installing the new light fixture or figuring out how to make a complicated home entertainment system work seamless for a wife and kids who have no idea how it all hooks together, etc., etc., etc.
Not at all. They are chaotic crapholes compared to the estrogen heavy office building. You are talking about fat chicks and other assorted mental defectives that live in squalor. A normal woman will look at your garage, see everything in its’ place and complain about the oil stains on the concrete and the weird smell. That doesn’t imply that women would run a tidier shop.. It means she’ll always have something to bitch about, which is entirely about her own subjective standards and desire to find fault to have something to complain about.
For a thought experiment ask yourself if you cleaned up after one of these fat slobs you apparently know, if they would actually think it was a big deal? Probably not. You scrub the grout clean, and get the mildew smell out of the bathroom, but you put the toilet paper on the roller backwards and left a fingerprint smudge on the mirror! OMG the place is a wreck!
Societies with peasants and royalty usually had those peasants being ruled by local lords, who themselves answered to their mutual king. Rome likewise had a hierarchical power structure, and ancient Greek city-states often had a similar hierarchy and/or class-based institutions that reflected different facets of society similar to the British House of Lords and House of Commons.
So I don’t this is something that has ‘always been this way’. I think it has been this way before in certain times and places, but it is by no means a universal trait of human societies.
There are a fair amount of college programs geared to getting and supporting women in STEM fields. Some outreach programs and some societies like “Women in Engineering” at my former college. I don’t know what kind of impact they have on retention rates. That said, I wonder what it will take to satisfy feminists on this issue. 60/40 women to men like in the undergraduate aggregate? Why do feminists care so much?
Regardless, there’s a glut of STEM PhD holders now:
http://mikethemadbiologist.com/2012/07/09/the-stem-phd-glut-makes-the-mainstream-media/
So, people want to encourage women to struggle for years in science only to be greeted by a job market that doesn’t need them? A job market that is constantly hounding the government to get more H-1B visas awarded to drive down wages. I wonder why women don’t sign up for it.
Concerning your point Chuck about your friend’s wife, food stamps, and not wanting to go to work, I actually think that is a good thing (If it wasn’t his wife but his girlfriend, or if she were a single mother, that would be a different thing). I actually think it is good when women chose to be housewives, and to the extent that it is prudent this should be encouraged by the government (Two benefits: Fewer women in the worksforce can help lower what I think will be the long-term problem of unemployment, and more employed men will have the status to attract hypergamous women).
“Why a single mom is better off with a $29,000 job and welfare than taking a $69,000 job.” http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/07/julias-mother-why-a-single-mom-is-better-off-on-welfare-than-taking-a-69000-a-year-job/comment-page-1/#comment-175130
Interesting article. Here’s my own observation from one 28-year old black female that I’m familiar with. Two sons, age 1 and 5, from two different absentee fathers. The woman has held down a full-time job in the fast food business since high school graduation and has been a 40-hour per week shift manager at the same establishment for the past five years. The business keeps all employees to no more than 40 hours per week to avoid OT. The job includes health insurance for the worker. So, at $12 per hour, her gross annual wages total $25K. Now, here’s her estimated annual government aid: Medicaid for two kids, say, $4800 per year if she had to purchase a family plan. $4800 rent assistance. $9600 day care assistance. $4800 food stamps. $3000 EITC. Add the government aid to her $25K wages and her total gross “income” more than doubles to $52,000. Her household is now like a two-income family, but her “husband” is the government.
“I judge a comedy on this metric: how much I laugh.”
This isn’t a bad standard by any means, but I think Louie is the most profound show on television, and it’s important for that reason alone. It may not always be funny, but it does generally provide an in-depth look into the life of the loser beta in remarkably honest terms.
Incidentally, all the love that Louie get from left-wing entertainment critics intrigues me. I think most critics are generally good at finding the shows and movies that matter, but are generally bad at figuring out why they matter. Louie, I think, is the perfect example of this.
@ C.R.
Sorry, way late here. Because invoking his name is to have the quote immediately dismissed by most of this readership. So I left it a mystery as to whom I was quoting. I hope it was clear that I was quoting, deception was not my intention at all. I just happened to read PK’s column, literally a minute before I came here.
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