Copping an Attitude While Wetting Your Panties

Update: Some of you are reaching this post based on Google searches involving the term "panties." Please break yourself of your Internet porn habits. You will be a better person and the world a better place if you do. And now, on with the original post.

A week or so ago, Mandi Hamlin was stopped in an airport security line and was forced to remove her metal nipple rings.

A Texas woman who said she was forced to remove a nipple ring with pliers in order to board an airplane called Thursday for an apology by federal security agents and a civil rights investigation.

She got all hot and bothered because of it and everyone was thrown into a tizzy. Give me a break. This is exactly the kind of reaction she wanted in the first place. Nobody gets nipple rings because they want to blend in - it's an act of exhibitionism. "Look at me, everyone! I have nipple rings! I've got attitude and rules don't apply to me!"

Geeze, Mandi, if you want your boobs to be the center of attention, you need to take the good with the bad. It reminds me of the old Onion story about the woman who got breast implants who wanted men to stop staring at her chest. So Mandi got pulled over by the TSA and they made her remove the rings. Thanks a lot, Mandi. All the people in line are really happy with you. I'm sure the TSA agents who were trying to figure out what to do were glad to see you as well. You must have really made their day. Now their actions are being examined by everyone just so you can run around with nipple piercings.

No, Mandi, that's not an immature act of self-promotion, not at all. And believe you me, none of us think you're a dimwitted, narcissistic skank. Nope. No way.

So now a bunch of low-paid TSA employees have to answer a lot of questions and a bunch of travellers had to wait in line a while longer, all so Mandi could cop an attitude and show the world she wasn't some 1950s June Cleaver. She lives by her own rules, baby. She's a rebel. Until that childish act of rebellion has a price and then she's running off to the authorities to complain. Yep, Mandi, you're a real voice for personal freedom. Thanks.

Barbara Billingsley would have gladly worn a spiked dog collar and a 3/4" hexheaded bolt as a tongue piercing, only she was oppressed by The Man.
Jeanne Bliss (perhaps wearing an MGB cylinder head stud through the back of her neck, perhaps not) uses this as a customer service lesson for TSA and takes those folks to task. Apparently, copping an attitude has now become subject to bureaucratic review.

Last Night's Sunset

...was pretty good. I got a video and set it to the B-52s' Topaz. It's about 80 minutes squeezed into 1:10. I framed the picture to keep the wiggly palm trees to a minimum - that's why the sun sets just barely off camera.

Let me know what you think of it.

Oakland and Marriage

In yesterday's post on the decay of the American culture of marriage, I quoted from Marriage and Caste in America and the author's proposition that marriage is a goal that gives meaning and structure to your life long before you marry. Comparing that to Rev. Wright's lunatic rants that Barack Obama is now having to defend, it was obvious that the intellectual underpinnings of people like Barack and Rev. Wright are inimical to a culture of marriage. Today I want to look at a similar intellectual foundation that has contributed to the destruction of American families - that of multiculturalism.

In short, there is no consistently successful substitute for the traditional, nuclear family despite decades of academics and intellectuals telling us that there is.

In 1965, Daniel Moynihan's Department of Labor under President Johnson published a report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. It was a thorough examination of the state of the black family in 1965 by an organization deeply committed to overcoming the nation's racism. Here's a tidbit.

The fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of family structure. The evidence — not final, but powerfully persuasive — is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. A middle class group has managed to save itself, but for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated.

Moynihan's report was assailed as racist and an entire academic school of thought was created to combat the notion that nuclear families were crucial to society's success. To believe in the value of the nuclear family was to be a racist and a sexist. From Marriage and Caste in America:

Other black-pride-inspired scholars looked at female-headed families and declared them authentically African and therefore a good thing. In a related vein, Carol Stack published All Our Kin, a 1974 HEW-funded study of families in a Midwestern ghetto with many multigenerational female households. In an implicit criticism of American individualism, Stack depicted "The Flats," as she dubbed her setting, as a vibrant and cooperative urban village, where mutual aid - including from sons, brothers, and uncles, who provided financial support and strong role models for children - created "a tenacious, active, lifelong network."

You can get a whiff of Hillary and Barack in the "village" notion and the "authentically African" one as well. Rather than suggest that the nuclear family was the successful model to follow, academics and intellectuals suggested that there were any number of possible choices for success. Unfortunately, Oakland, the murder capital of the US, has proven them wrong.

Many of the convicted killers were quasi-homeless in grade school, moving every 90 days on eviction cycles, or bouncing between friends' and relatives' homes, where they slept on recliners and couches and floors.

Inside the home is pure chaos. Typically, they live with a third-generation relative, an elderly grandmother or aunt, who also opens her home to several other wayward relatives. They all pile into one home, bringing their boyfriends and girlfriends and their children. There's no particular person in charge, no house rules, and people come and go.

Often it's in these houses where young boys first learn how to hold a gun, how to break a rock of cocaine into dime and nickel bags for sale.

Without parents to help them mature, the mental world of these young killers stays stuck in an infantile, egotistic state, said forensic psychologist Shawn Johnston, who has conducted more than 15,000 court evaluations of adult and juvenile criminals in 15 Northern California counties.

"What keeps us from killing each other is empathy, and we learn it from bonding with parents who pick us back up when we get hurt or teased as children," Johnston said. "Without it, you get guys who live in a constant state of protecting the fantasy that they are the most important thing this side of the Milky Way. And because they don't have empathy, they will shoot or stab to protect their illusion."

Across the country, we are currently grappling with the results of the destruction of the American culture of marriage. Like a train in the first stages of derailment, the national debate is still about family structures that have proven to be failures. Gay marriage and single parent homes are legitimized by people who continue to use intellectual foundations that have long since been proven false.

All aboard for Social Pathologyville!
As the current presidential campaign moves on, a question I would like to hear asked of all the candidates is this. "What's the long-term solution for Oakland?" The answers would be illuminating.

A Feline Divining Rod

Our Maximum Leader has detected water! All she needs now is for someone to sit on the countertop, turn on the faucet and cup their hands under the running water for her to drink.

Spoiled? No, she's not spoiled. What makes you say that?

Marriage and Rev. Wright

Here's a strange connection for you. What do the Rev. Wright's sermons on white racism have to do with the culture of marriage? Yesterday I blogged about the notion that marriage is part of an overall life structure, one created to ensure long-term stability, a concept take from the book Marriage and Caste in America. Here's a little bit more from that book, discussing a generalization drawn from interviews of inner-city men who have drifted from one relationship to the next. Here, the connection between jobs and marriage is made.

(W)here do jobs fit in this script? The marriage market thesis has it that men who cannot find decent work in a job market that treats them so shabbily will inevitably seem inadequate marriage partners. But this argument confuses cause and correlation. What is clear from listening to men like Tyrell is that indifference toward marriage grows out of the same psychological soil as the inability to earn a decent living. Men do not get married because they have a steady job; they get married because they are the kind of person who can get and keep a steady job. As Datcher's story shows, the very task of looking for "the right woman" means projecting yourself into the future and taking a mindful approach to life.

One of the most striking things about talking to poor inner-city men is their sense of drift; life is something that happens to them. I asked several men where they would like to be in ten years; all of them gave me a puzzled, I-never-really-thought-about-it look. Both marriage and vocation are part of the project that is the deliberate pursuit of a meaningful and connected life. To put it a little differently, to marry and to earn a steady living are to try to master life and shape it into a coherent narrative.

The argument is that people are either acculturated to self-reliance and striving for a stable life, or to short-term survival and self-gratification. If you are constantly told that your failures are the result of external forces, then there is not much point in working towards long-term success. In the end, all your efforts could be destroyed by The Man.

With this in mind, take another listen to Rev. Wright. Listen to the underlying theme: the world is large and out to get you and that you are small and victimized by everything around you.

If this is the world view you are immersed in, what are the chances you will grow up "to try to master life and shape it into a coherent narrative?"

I've got the Open House Blues

My house is up for sale and last Sunday we held our first open house. In the final hour or so of preparation, I was asked to stash all paperwork and kitchen implements out of sight. I did so, knowing full well that many of them would never be seen again.

I'm still looking for some of them. It turns out that finding a hiding place to hide things is much easier than finding a hiding place to find things. Do any of you know where I hid the sugar cannister?

So What's The Big Deal About Marriage?

I just got my copy of Marriage and Caste in America, yet another book I'm reading on the sociology of the breakdown of the American family. The book makes a very John Edwards-like argument that I happen to agree with completely - there really are two Americas, one rich and one poor. The defining feature is one that John Edwards missed entirely and that is the marital status of families.

There's a great deal to go into here, but because I'm getting started late today on the blog, I'll just give a thumbnail of the most surprising tidbit I found.

Marriage shapes your life, even before it occurs.

Think about two men, one anticipating getting married, the other not. The one who is anticipating marriage structures his life so that he can support a family and a wife. He dates with at least some notion of permanence in his head - he's not just a score hound. Whether or not he stays celibate, he is at least trying to set things up in the right order - marriage and then children. He looks for his girlfriends to prove their worthiness as wives and probably to a much lesser extent because of inexperience, as mothers. He thinks in terms of a career that will support more than his bodily needs.

The second man, not anticipating marriage, is simply looking for tonight's score, or at best, someone with whom he can shack up. His career is centered around keeping food on his table, clothes on his back and a car available. There's not much else required. If he gets his girlfriend pregnant, he might be willing to give some support, but that level of support is very ill-defined even though his intentions might be good. Pampers and some Similac and a visit now and again with some cash to give the mom is probably as much fathering as he's going to do. When the mom starts getting bitchy, he bails out to another girlfriend.

In that scenario, think back to the notion of sex ratios. In an environment where there are more women (synthetic or not) than men, the mother of his child doesn't have a whole lot of leverage, does she? If she's tired and bitchy because Junior's been up all night with colic, she's not much fun to be around, while Judy down the street (or any number of pornographic images) is fresh and ready for fun. Mom is easily replaced because the man is looking only for his own, short-term gratification. Mom simply can't compete in that arena. She and the kid(s) get dumped.

In the married family, children grow up amidst an implicit social structure. Two lives have been purposefully shaped, to some extent, for the rearing of children. It's much more than a ring on your finger, it's the way you see the world and how you've prepared. In the unmarried family, it's everyone for themselves, children included. The end result is the "Two Americas" John Edwards talked about.

More to follow.

It's a Double Header!

...a double header daisy, that is. Momma's little redhead has got another mutant flower.



Pretty cool, no?

A Cellular Phone Quiz

My son just discovered that his Cingular phone is broken. This would never have happened if it had been a Sprint phone. Want to know why?

It never would have worked in the first place for him to notice it was broken.

Counter Insurgency a la Barack Obama

In a recent argument with a reporter asking him questions about Iraq, Barack, in addition to deliberately misunderstanding John McCain's quote about staying in Iraq for 100 years, posits a positively preposterous plan to pursue terrorists in Iraq after American troops have been withdrawn. Barack suggests that we maintain a "strike force" somewhere in the region. Kuwait, perhaps?

Just when has a counter-insurgency ever worked when run from a distant location? The success of the surge and all the lessons learned from the last few months shows this idea to be total nonsense. It's just flat out retreat and surrender, dressed up as something else.

On the Effects of Sex Ratios

I love that title. That and the URL Blogger will generate from it should bring me lots of hits from Google searches. :-)

This is another in a series of posts exploring the sociology of the breakdown of families in America.

An area's Sex Ratio is defined as (# of men / # of women). If there is a high sex ratio, there are many more men than women, if there is a low sex ratio, there are many more women than men. The sex ratio of a nation, state or city has several effects, as I have learned from reading The Marriage Problem.

Simply put, women want marriage, men want sex. That may fly in the face of modern, politically correct thought, but it's born out by statistics. When there are more men than women, women are more valued and have greater leverage. They have an easier time getting what they want and the marriage rate is higher. When there are more women than men, the marriage rate is lower. When women have more bargaining power, there are more marriages.

Yesterday, I posted a quiz question asking, "Which state was the first to give women the vote?" We've got a lot of educated readers, because you all got it right. The answer was Wyoming. In fact, the first 11 states to give women the vote were all frontier states where the sex ratio was very high, that is, there were many more men than women. How is it that women, being such a small minority in these states, managed to get the vote there first?

Simple answer: they were more valued.

Though the political movement for women's suffrage was based in the East, the eleven states that had, by the end of 1914, granted women the vote were all in the West. Indeed, wild, boisterous Wyoming led the pack by extending the suffrage in 1890. Sophisticated easterners argued for suffrage, but primitive westerners did it. The reason, in most cases, was the belief that if women could vote they would help civilize the territory. As Alan Grimes put it, "Men conquered the wilderness, women made it habitable."

Here's another tidbit.

Southern and gold rush Americans elevated decent women onto a pedestal, defending their honor and attacking detractors with grim determination. In Yellowstone City, the law once imposed the death sentence on anyone insulting a respectable woman.

This deferance towards women was an American trait; the Chinese laborers in these territories treated their women like property. As an aside, this fact is left out of my daughter's social studies texts as they strive to show what beasts white men were to everyone else.

Drawing now from Boys Adrift as it talks about the growing number of men still living with their parents well into their 20s and 30s, we find that in modern America, the sex ratio is artificially low. By that, I mean that there are more women than men and many of those women are artificial.

Traditionally, one of the factors driving Western society has been the fact that women prefer successful, affluent men over men who are less successful. Because men understood that women would be reluctant to marry men who couldn't comfortably support a wife and children, men were motivated to be successful. That simple mechanism has suffered a double whammy in the past forty years. First, sex has been divorced from marriage. Second - and here's what's really disturbing to those of us in the over-thirty crowd - sexual satisfaction has been divorced from women altogether. If you don't work with today's teenage boys on a regular basis, you may not understand the extent to which pornographic images of women have replaced the real thing. In the general population, the best estimates are that roughly 70 percent of college-age men now use pornography regularly.

In the Old West, women were scarce and highly valued. In modern America, there is an endless supply of women, even if terabytes of them are not, in fact, real. Women, being plentiful, have less leverage over men, particularly when it comes to marriage. The decay of our sexual morality has removed still more of their leverage over men.

The result? Fewer marriages to begin with and more divorces in those that do get married. The family is much, much weaker.

More on this in subsequent posts.

Cheezburger of the Day

see more crazy cat pics

Theocratic Heroism

...can be found at our Monastery of Miscellaneous Musings. Stop by and give the monks some appreciation.

A New Topic Series at the Post

I've posted in the past about my business analysis of single parenting. I've become interested in the sociology of the whole thing and am currently reading two books which contribute different views on the subject. One is Boys Adrift, which is about how more boys are failing to make the jump from adolescence into adulthood in a variety of ways. The other is The Marriage Problem, which is about how and why the breakdown in marriage is affecting our society. There are all kinds of ways these two books, as well as some others I'm going through right now, develop a pretty complete picture of the situation.

As I read and learn, I will share my path of discovery with you.

Yarr! There be a new course to set for blog post topics!

Quiz Question for the Day

OK, all you feline theocraticians and visitors to The Scratching Post, put on your thinking caps, because we've got a trivia question for you. No fair looking it up ahead of time, either. We'll post the answer and an intriguing reason for the result tomorrow.

What state was the first to give women the right to vote?
	New York
	Wyoming
	Georgia
	New Hampshire
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Chalk Up Another Win for the Good Guys

From the Long War Journal:

Six days after the Iraqi government launched Operation Knights’ Charge in Basrah against the Mahdi Army and other Iranian-backed Shia terror groups, Muqtada al Sadr, the Leader of the Mahdi Army, has called for his fighters to lay down their weapons and cooperate with Iraqi security forces. Sadr’s call for an end to the fighting comes as his Mahdi Army has taken serious losses since the operation began.

"Sadr has sent a message to his loyalists urging them to end all armed activities," the Al Iraqiya television channel reported. Sadr "disowned anyone attacking the state institutions or parties' offices and headquarters."

Read the whole thing.

Cheezburger of the Day

see more crazy cat pics

March 28 Sunset

Here's last night's sunset, sans music. It had drama, but not much color. I was in too much of a hurry to compensate for the uneven mounting of the camera, so the scene lists a bit to port. It's 30 minutes condensed into 40 seconds. Enjoy!

And the Hits Just Keep On Coming

From this weekend's Wall Street Journal, we have this article suggesting that opposition to Hillary is, in part, a backlash against the gains of feminism.

When Sen. Clinton started her presidential campaign more than a year ago, she said she wanted to shatter the ultimate glass ceiling. But many of her supporters see something troubling in the sometimes bitter resistance to her campaign and the looming possibility of her defeat: a seeming backlash against the opportunities women have gained.

Just as Barack Obama's campaign has been empowering for African-Americans, Sen. Clinton's run has inspired women across the country, drawing millions to the polls and putting her in a neck-and-neck battle for the nomination. She has already gone farther than any woman before her -- a source of great pride for her women supporters.

But her campaign has also prompted slurs and inflammatory language that many women thought had been banished from public discourse. Some women worry that regardless of how the election turns out, the resistance to Sen. Clinton may embolden some men to resist women's efforts to share power with them in business, politics and elsewhere.

This is just a continuance of the identity politics that are wrecking the Democratic party. Meanwhile, men have become a minority at Universities, the institutions which are the feed system for the vast majority of positions of power. You don't need statistical training to see that this kind of gender analysis is no longer valid. And yet it goes on.

On MySpace and Sexual Competition

A year or so ago, my son got a MySpace account. Being a dutiful father, I got one, too, just to see what it was like and to monitor what was going on. What I saw blew me away. A large portion of MySpace is a soft-core porn site. The stuff my son likes are the indie bands' music and videos, but almost universally, the girls' profiles are exercises in soft porn.

I tsk-tsked and tut-tutted and felt the whole country was going down the tubes. How could these girls do this? Then I picked up a copy of Boys Adrift. That book addresses how young men are doing progressively worse in terms of careers, education and marriage. I'll post more on that later, but in a partial nutshell, their time and energy is being spent on video games and porn. Those two industries are designed by sophisticated professionals to take as much time and money from boys as possible.

The porn part opened my eyes to what was going on with the girls on MySpace. It's no longer a case of competing with Judy down the street for a guy's attention, it's a matter of competing with Judy and with terabytes of porn. In order to compete, the girls have to sink lower and lower. In the book, the author quotes one girl he interviewed as saying something to the effect of "If I don't dress like this (she looked like a model out of Maxim) then no one is going to notice me at all."

Putting these two things together, along with the sexual revolution which removed all taboos from recreational sex, it's no wonder there's a marriage problem in the country. However, it's not all bad news.

If you turn the problem on it's head, I would argue that a boy that was reasonably athletic and ambitious and managed to stay out of the clutches of the porn industry would have an enormous competitive advantage in getting the right girl. In essence, most of his competition has taken themselves out of the picture by succumbing to the temptations around them.

That's not a bad lesson to teach your sons.