What part of "equal" do we just not get?

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The four types of people in the world

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You know who you are.

Quote of the day

"Real men--and women--ride motorcycles." 

--me

April Fool's Day, 2011

"Always you have to contend with the stupidity of men."--Henry David Thoreau
American Essayist, Poet and Philosopher, 1817-1862

Happy April Fool's Day, y'all.

Quote of the day--on gender roles

"We live in a society where the nation's leading universities' enrollments are majority female, and it's time the media started recognizing that women and men should no longer feel pressured to follow strict, dated guidelines of gender behavior." --Daniel Koh, MBA Student at Harvard Business School

Men: On shifting sand, Part II

Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But for the first time in human history, that is changing—and with shocking speed. Cultural and economic changes always reinforce each other. And the global economy is evolving in a way that is eroding the historical preference for male children, worldwide... What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men? The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly male. In fact, the opposite may be true. Women in poor parts of India are learning English faster than men to meet the demands of new global call centers. Women own more than 40 percent of private businesses in China, where a red Ferrari is the new status symbol for female entrepreneurs. Last year, Iceland elected Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir, the world’s first openly lesbian head of state, who campaigned explicitly against the male elite she claimed had destroyed the nation’s banking system, and who vowed to end the “age of testosterone.” Food for thought, gentlemen. Link to original post: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135

Kansas City in Atlantic Monthly article: The End of Men

A great and important read (see link below): None of the 30 or so men sitting in a classroom at a downtown Kansas City school have come for voluntary adult enrichment. Having failed to pay their child support, they were given the choice by a judge to go to jail or attend a weekly class on fathering, which to them seemed the better deal. This week’s lesson, from a workbook called Quenching the Father Thirst, was supposed to involve writing a letter to a hypothetical estranged 14-year-old daughter named Crystal, whose father left her when she was a baby. But El-Scari has his own idea about how to get through to this barely awake, skeptical crew, and letters to Crystal have nothing to do with it. Like them, he explains, he grew up watching Bill Cosby living behind his metaphorical “white picket fence”—one man, one woman, and a bunch of happy kids. “Well, that check bounced a long time ago,” he says. “Let’s see,” he continues, reading from a worksheet. What are the four kinds of paternal authority? Moral, emotional, social, and physical. “But you ain’t none of those in that house. All you are is a paycheck, and now you ain’t even that. And if you try to exercise your authority, she’ll call 911. How does that make you feel? You’re supposed to be the authority, and she says, ‘Get out of the house, bitch.’ She’s calling you ‘bitch’!” The men are black and white, their ages ranging from about 20 to 40. A couple look like they might have spent a night or two on the streets, but the rest look like they work, or used to. Now they have put down their sodas, and El-Scari has their attention, so he gets a little more philosophical. “Who’s doing what?” he asks them. “What is our role? Everyone’s telling us we’re supposed to be the head of a nuclear family, so you feel like you got robbed. It’s toxic, and poisonous, and it’s setting us up for failure.” He writes on the board: $85,000. “This is her salary.” Then: $12,000. “This is your salary. Who’s the damn man? Who’s the man now?” A murmur rises. “That’s right. She’s the man.” Judging by the men I spoke with afterward, El-Scari seemed to have pegged his audience perfectly. Darren Henderson was making $33 an hour laying sheet metal, until the real-estate crisis hit and he lost his job. Then he lost his duplex—“there’s my little piece of the American dream”—then his car. And then he fell behind on his child-support payments. “They make it like I’m just sitting around,” he said, “but I’m not.” As proof of his efforts, he took out a new commercial driver’s permit and a bartending license, and then threw them down on the ground like jokers, for all the use they’d been. His daughter’s mother had a $50,000-a-year job and was getting her master’s degree in social work. He’d just signed up for food stamps, which is just about the only social-welfare program a man can easily access. Recently she’d seen him waiting at the bus stop. “Looked me in the eye,” he recalled, “and just drove on by.” The men in that room, almost without exception, were casualties of the end of the manufacturing era. Most of them had continued to work with their hands even as demand for manual labor was declining. Since 2000, manufacturing has lost almost 6 million jobs, more than a third of its total workforce, and has taken in few young workers. The housing bubble masked this new reality for a while, creating work in construction and related industries. Many of the men I spoke with had worked as electricians or builders; one had been a successful real-estate agent. Now those jobs are gone too. Henderson spent his days shuttling between unemployment offices and job interviews, wondering what his daughter might be doing at any given moment. In 1950, roughly one in 20 men of prime working age, like Henderson, was not working; today that ratio is about one in five, the highest ever recorded. More later today. Link to original post: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135

Whole new world

The American people, by and large, don't know that the world around them is changing, wholesale, in so many ways, and isn't going back to the way it used to be.

At all.

One study I saw recently pointed out how our workforce is going to end up being occupied, mostly, by females.

Don't get me wrong--I'm no sexist.

This, to me, is not a bad thing, it's just a matter-of-fact.

And the thing is, up to now, it's not been the other way around, uh, let's see--FOREVER?

And the thing is, it combines two factors.

One is that it is cheaper in the entire world, sadly, to hire women than men so that lends to this trend significantly.

The other thing is that, at least in the United States, more women are going to college than men--and that's a change, too, of course.

There are so many worldwide and nationwide changes that are taking place right now, it's hard to keep up.

Many, many political scientists and economists think that it's highly likely that the United States may have already lost its position in the world, politically and financially.

Smaller issues are about the fact that Caucasians are fewer in number all the time in the US. Hispanic and Latino populations are growing in size every year. We've already passed the place where "White" people were the majority.

If the financial situation pans out the way so many economists warn, America will have fallen from our place of power and strength, at the same time the White Man realizes he's lost his place alongside both women and Hispanics and Latinos.

Believe me, it's not a problem for me.

Let's hope it's not a problem for people of lesser educations and financial means.