Changing Concepts of Marriage and Raising Children I read an article in the Outlook section of the Washington Post on Sunday, and the issues that it raised were quite startling. The author's project is that the socioeconomic status of black women is opposed to the idea of marriage, and that more frequently black women prefer to raise children and create families alone rather than have an involved father figure. I understand that this is not a new circumstance, but the fact that women are actively having children without a father is a very unsettling idea, especially if you take the author's prediction that this is foreshadowing for what is to come for other race/class combinations in the United States.

Jones' idea comes from the fact that the male counterparts of black women in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties usually earn far less money, are more likely to have problems steming from their youth (drug use, other illigitimate children [can we even use this term anymore?], etc.). If you couple this idea with recent studies that show that women have been doing much better than men in college (I had a good article on this, but I lost the link. I'll post it if I find it), then the idea of women settling down into a more 'traditional' role in the family will be fading quickly.

I'm fine with the idea that women will soon outpace men in terms of career-oriented success, but the idea that this will directly lead to the utter demise of the family as we know it is horrifying. If you couple this trend with the increasing use of artificial insemination that I mentioned earlier, the effects of this are incalculable to coming generations of the American family. I am not against women in the workforce, at all. But I sincerely believe that a child should be raised with a loving and constantly present mother and father. Having kids is not the right of any single parent, or anyone as a whole. But once someone has a child, they have a responsability to do whatever necessary to bring that child up as good as they possibly can. It doesn't seem to me that this really matters to people.

Even the way that children are being raised is changing. Many suspect that the generation gap is dead and that parents are no longer 'growing up' the way that they used to. I sincerely hope that my concerns are for none because the future would be quite bleak if these children develop into the type of people who are hurting morality, philosophy, and American politics today.  ¶ 10:15 PM 0 Comments

  Hugo Chavez Hugo Chavez is a mad man. I really wish we would depose him and all other crazy socialist leaders down there. The down side to democracy is that sometimes it doesn't work out how we want it to.  ¶ 4:50 PM 0 Comments

  Damn Those Russians! This article from the Washington Times, if it's true, will really change the way the US views Russia, and subsequently parts of Europe and Iran. This isn't a good thing.

The cold war is over. The Russians need to lose this hardon they have for working against us.  ¶ 4:41 PM 0 Comments

  European Economic Analysis Read this article from the Brussels Journal about the problems of large welfare government in Europe bringing forth their own demise. Good read, albeit dry.  ¶ 4:25 PM 0 Comments

  VDH is the man If you don't know who Victor Davis Hanson is, you should. He is a leading Classicist who has brought new life to the study of classical civilization and initiated new programs in various universities. Beyond that, he also is one of the greatest minds giving commentary on Western civilization. In his lastest book, which i'm dying to read, he compares the
Peloponnesian war with the war against terror which we are waging worldwide. I saw him on BookTV right before I moved to Chicago. If you want to read a great article discussing the libertarian-right party line on Iraq, et al, check out his article on National Review Online. Read it all. It's fantastic.  ¶ 3:55 PM 0 Comments

  For Dave... Hey Dave.. check this out.

  ¶ 5:31 PM 0 Comments

  On the Benedictine Article... I've had some serious doubts about Pope Benedict for a long time. Though I am not Catholic, and really know quite little about the Catholic church, some of the high profile policies that the media has been tearing apart has made me incredibly cautious and sceptical about his papacy. I won't go so far now to say that all of my fears have been displaced by sheer hope, but an article he wrote for First Things really changed my view on him, his politics, and his policies as a whole.

For another Kingism (thats 2 in one day!), Benedict is da bomb, dawg!

His article begins by explaining what Europe is beyond the arbitrary geographical divide between Asia and Africa that it is today. Benedict breaks down what exactly formed the concept of Europe, and how it exists today. He points mainly to the establishment of the Roman Empire, it's conversion to Christianity, and the divide that began with the center of the Holy Roman Empire moving to Constantinople. He then examines how the Latins, Greeks, Slavics, Germanics, and Britains began this noble experiment in Europe, and how though their cultural identities may differ greatly, they share some common bonds. But this is all a fantastic history lesson that anyone probably could have synthesized by reading a Wikipedia article about it.

The greatness comes with his discussion of what many herald to be the dying throes of Europe. I share Benedicts view that Europe is certainly in a bad state of affairs right now, but Europe can be saved. Europe's ailments stem from a loss in faith, secularism, technology, newly introduced cultures, and self loathing.

Here's where the most interesting part of the article forms: Benedict's suggestions to cure Europe. To sum it up, the way to fix Europe is to ensure human rights, fix the family and marriage, and bring religion back into the picture. It seems like a pretty good idea to me.

  ¶ 6:17 PM 0 Comments

  I know this is bad form... but... I posted this as a reply to a comment on something i wrote in my Livejournal (I know, I know).

It's a little incoherent and vague, but I figured I should post this and save it for a rainy day or something.

Let's take this from a Good Semaritan point of view which, though i concede this war was not waged under this pretense, I'll assert that this is what really is happening over there.

We can universalize the idea of helping people who are in need. I don't think there's ever a case when any legitimate code of ethics would allow us to turn a blind eye towards people in distress. The people in Iraq, let me tell you, were in distress. When a leader is in power who indiscriminately kills large numbers of people, these oppressed people exemplify need.

Why shouldn't we support these people? What is a bigger sacrifice for the largest, most powerful, advanced, and wealthy nation on the earth to sacrifice its own money and citizens to liberate others?

My problem with this war is that it shouldn't be happening now. It should have been taken care of during the Gulf War. We shouldn't have stopped where we did, we should have deposed Sadam, and saved the Iraqi people a decade of more intense suffering because of our retaliatory attacks on a crazed dictator.

I also advocate MORE war in this kind of vein. Let's go help the people in Beirut. And in Africa, who are being slaughtered in tribal wars (Rawanda?). Iran? Sudan? Lebanon? (to quote Mr King) DDDDOOOUUCCHHHEE Outta here. Let's kick out Castro, and liberate Cuba. We should put our feet down and say that as the most powerful nation in the world that we will not tolerate injustice and evil anywhere else. It's good for our economy (and theirs), its good for national and global security, and it allows us to put a lot more pressure on countries like North Korea and China, HUGE threats to global peace and human rights.


Or, you know, we could just sit at home, claim defeat already, and wait for the shining symbol of freedom and democracy in the world to get attacked, sacked, raped, and destroyed like Rome was by a group of savage barbarians carrying nuclear weapons.

I'm sorry Val, this wasn't where i wanted any of this to go. But i think we should talk online soon about this stuff, if you promise not to take it personally and to really have an open mind about what I have to say about it.

  ¶ 3:14 PM 0 Comments

  Another excellent example of why America rocks. In a Wall Street Journal Editorial today, the case is made for more American unilaterial action into the Sudan and Chad to stop the Muslim ethnic clensing of Africans.

The UN can't seem to get their act together to do this, and NATO is useless and antiquated now. The more events develop in the world, the more that Bush's "You are either with us or against us" seems to become a concrete real principle of action for how the world works. 

We may not have it all right, but I think we have it the most right. And that has to count for something.

I'd love to see what the anti-war sect have to say about this. If they lend an ounce of support to it, then their case against Iraq crumbles. If they stand against it, however, then they allow for pacificsm to enter a new realm indifference where the America ignores the plight of persecuted people for the sake of some rediculous principle.   ¶ 2:51 PM 0 Comments

  Hugo Chavez I want to kill Hugo Chavez.

This guy is a madman, and the fact that the world allows people to go of spewing this kind of absolute horeshit says a lot about the state of affairs in South America.    ¶ 4:42 PM 0 Comments

  Oh, Nostalga I was reading my usual cannon of weblogs today when I came upon this delicious little post off Glen Reynolds's Instapundit

If you want to see a nice collection of pre-war predictions from the anti-war scene, read through the whole article. Some of these people actually thought that anywhere between 40,000-100,000 people would die. Many thought that nuclear bombs would be dropped, and mass chaos would spread. Well, now that the war has gone MUCH better than that, they would rather make a even less convincing case about how the war is going terribly wrong. In Vietnam, the number of soldiers who died on one bloody day would significanly outpace the number of American casualties that this war has dealt out in the last 3 years. The number of Iraqi civilian deaths is dwarfed compared to the number that Sadam would kill in one of his fits of Genocide (i believe one of them went up to around 30,000 people). Most that have died in this war are not civilians, but terrorists and Baathist soldiers. The enemy. 

In a related story, my campus is now deluged with sidewalk grafiti including slogans like "Pax","Peace Now","Stop the War!","No More Killing!","Bush Lies!", etc. This in addition to the campus being littered with plastic green soldiers with cute little anti-war facts glued to the bottom of them (Pollution? Littering?). If i were so motivated i would love to start a coaliton of people to go out and correct their scrawlings to reflect some more accurate data. 

But i'm lazy, and i go to college. And these people just don't deserve my time. 

Update: I forgot to link to this article off Soxblog earlier. If you want another slap in the face of these antiwar communists we are dealing with, then take a gander at this.  ¶ 7:20 PM 0 Comments

  The New American Family I rarely ever watch 60 Minutes. Usually I find something more interesting on than bad news-magazine journalism, but this story itself snagged my attention.

The story, in case you don't care to read it yourself, is about the children who are born of either single or lesbian mothers by way of artificial insemination. These children have been raised without knowing who contributed half of their DNA to create them. This situation is not completely new to our culture, but its now becoming a very common practice, and according to the article over 300,000 children are created each year by artificial insemination.

That's a lot of kids.

A parent of one such child has started a social networking website that allows children born artificially to find their half sliblings around the world. They simply enter information about themselves, the donor number of the man who gave the sperm, andvoilaa.

 [Insert vignette of 5 gorgeous kids walking down some suburban street in the midwest, all looking quite similar]

Doesn't something seem very wrong with all of this? First, the fact that 300,000 children are born YEARLY to single or lesbian parents is a statistic that certainly blew my mind. More surprising is the fact that all of these children feel some need to find eachother and in some cases find who is their father. I think all of this has a lot to say about the nature/nurture arguement that has been very important to the alternative family movement. Maybe these kids will end up being great wonderful products of their societies, but doesn't it seem incredibly interesting that the more we try to alienate ourselves and separate ourselves from the way that we lived before modern technology and alternative living, the more the younger generations seem to want to find some way to reconnect themselves with it?  ¶ 8:44 PM 0 Comments

  Wussy French Protestors. I saw this article published in the Post today. This is amazing!

Where do these French college-aged kids get off doing this? The government is only trying to jumpstart their rapidly dying econonmy. Europe's econonmy as a whole has been going down the tubes for years, as i'm sure we all know. Large social welfare programs such as these make these economies unattractive to large companies. The fact that these kids are upset that they can get fired from a job without being told why within the first two years of their employment is rediculous. They'd never make it in the US, and we have it pretty easy over here.  ¶ 4:26 PM 0 Comments