Back in the day, everyone had servants. The rich employed the middle class as servants, the middle class employed the impoverished as servants. Only the poorest of the poor would not themselves have servants, and even then, they occasionally employed each other in critical tasks such as wet-nursing.
The best servant was the manservant - the gentleman's gentleman.
His job was to know the wishes of his master before his master knew them. Clothes were laid out, baths were drawn, meals prepared before any request need be made.
He knew where all the skeletons were buried, but, being the soul of discretion, never revealed any family secrets to anyone outside of the family, nor even to those within the family, if that level of secrecy be required. Such is the legendary manservant of England.
Now, in order to accomplish these deeds, he needed to know his master perfectly, down to the merest whim. He needed to be able to predict his master's next move without fail. In short, the very best manservants were often smarter, more empathic, more discerning then the men they served. This is the dichotomy portrayed most perfectly in Wooster and Jeeves but also in myriad other art forms of a century long gone to us.
Gentleman's Gentleman 2.0
Why do I bring this up?
Well, the Gentleman's Gentleman has expanded his role. In centuries past, he could be afforded by only the richest of men. Very few men were good enough to fill the role, and they served only the cream of society. Today, everyone wants the job. Moreover, they are willing to serve the absolute lowest common denominator of economic classes.
I refer, of course, to Target. Target, Walmart, Kmart and similar enterprises are trying to create an advertising model based on your buying habits, an advertising model so perfect that they know you are pregnant or ill before you do. They lay out for you the products you will need in your upcoming travail before you are even fully aware that your travail is upcoming.
Now, we kick and moan about this as an "invasion of privacy." And it is, no question of it. But ultimately, we don't mind it because they are molding themselves into being our butlers. And we like having butlers. That's the whole point of the restaurant industry, right?
We create the societies we like to have serve us.
But we haven't fully realized what it is we want.
To Serve Mankind
For instance, take insurance companies. Just recently I had a discussion with another college professor about insurance companies. She was aghast and agog at the possibility that insurance companies might get a hold of her genome, sequence it, and drop her because she has some as yet unknown genetic problem.
I pointed out that, given her own attitudes towards genetic testing, they could hardly be expected to do otherwise. She was shocked by my response.
"Kate," said I, "you fully support genetic testing for Down's syndrome and you fully support aborting any fetus that tests positive for it."
"Well of course!" she replied, "Not all parents have the emotional or financial resources to care for such children. It's better for everyone if the fetus is simply aborted."
"Quite," I replied. "And that's exactly what our insurance companies are telling us. Not all companies have the emotional or financial resources to care for us as our genes start to express. They don't want to have to change their business model to accommodate us anymore than our exemplary parents want to change their lifestyles to accommodate a Down's syndrome child. So, they abort us from their policies. You can hardly fault them for that."
"But the two situations are not the same!" she answered.
"You are quite right," I agreed. "One is built on a parent-child bond, the other is a mere business contract. If parents can genetically profile their own children and kill whichever children turn out to be beyond the parents' resources, then certainly you would agree that business owners - who have much less duty towards their customers than a parent has towards his child - have at least the same right not only to genetically profile us but also to kill off any relationship that they judge is beyond their resources."
"We expect businesses to be butlers. We expect from them the same level of care that parents and children give towards each other. We intensely dislike it when businesses don't provide it. Certainly, if we expect that level of support, we must expect that level of personal inspection. We can also expect to be aborted. Any business or government capable enough to care for us is within their rights to abort us."
She insisted that the situations were different, but suddenly remembered a previous engagement and hurried off.
In short, she had not the resources to handle the conversation, so she aborted it.
Yes.
Quite.
Friday, June 22, 2012
Monday, June 18, 2012
Yoga and Shopping: The Ruin of Women
Women and Yogasms
Women enjoy yoga, and yoga is sexually titillating. The sex scandals involving yoga instructors are so well-known that the New York Times wrote a feature article saying exactly that: "Yoga and Sex Scandals: No Surprise There."
Women and Shopping
Shopping is likewise very problematic. Women who stumble on a sale experience the same rush of endorphins they would otherwise get through sexual stimulation. Really. I'm not making this up.
researchers hooked their subjects up to eye-tracking devices that showed them pornographic pictures, and then clippings from sale promotions, and the levels of excitement were the same! At least one New Yorker wasn't surprised, she told the paper that bargain shopping is "just like sex. Sales feel great for a moment, then you wake up the next morning, see the bill, say, 'What the hell did I just do?'" Men, you are one chocolate sale away from being replaced.In fact, the physiological reaction for women was identical whether they were looking at porn or a great sales coupon. Perhaps this explains why four in ten women would rather go shopping. From a physiological perspective, we would not be wrong to say that for women, shopping at a really good sale is the same as publicly masturbating.
If you find that comparison disgusting, I'm sorry, go talk to the physiologists.
I'm just telling you the facts about the endorphin rush: what women are actually doing, even if they don't realize it.
Men looking at porn, women looking at a sales circular: literally no difference.
Yoga and Shopping: The Horrific Results (And They Really Are Horrific)
What happens when women go shopping? Well, blood banks routinely demonstrate that about one-quarter of the husbands in America (especially those with economically dependent wives) are being cuckolded. A cuckold is a husband that cares for children he think are his, but are actually the result of his wife's fling with her boss or yoga instructor.
The blood bank study concerns just the children in families with serious family medical issues. The blood banks discovered the cuckolding because the families had to go to a blood bank and test for a possible transfusion for a family member. That test has no false positives, but can have lots of false negatives.
How does this work?
Let's just take the most common markers - ABO and Rh.
A, B and Rh are all dominant.
O is regressive.
A, B and Rh+ all indicate that certain proteins exist on the red blood cell's surface.
O and Rh- means those proteins aren't there.
So, if Dad is O and Mom is O, but the kid is A, B or AB, then that child clearly came from a different dad. He has proteins on his red blood cells that couldn't come from Mom or "Dad." So those proteins must have come from the mailman.
Same with Rh. If Dad is (O-) and Mom is (O-), but the kid is (O+), then daddy don't live at that house.
He's got proteins from somebody else.
But what if Dad is A, Mom is B or O, and the kid is O?
Well, we can't tell from just the blood test. Dad may actually be AO. And if Mom had a fling with a Type O man, you wouldn't be able to tell from the AB blood test. Same is true if the kid is AB. Now if Dad is A and Mom is O, the kid can't be AB without outside help, but A, B or O are all possible.
Same with Rh factor. If Mom is (Rh+), Mom can have a fling with ANYONE and the Rh factor wouldn't indicate it. 82% of the population is Rh(+).
So, using only the markers that indicate, without shadow of a doubt, that Dad is a cuckold, 28% of fathers in families with medically difficult situations are being cuckolded by their wives.
This chart shows the potential AB blood types you may inherit.
| Parent 1 | AB | AB | AB | AB | B | A | A | O | O | O | ||
| Parent 2 | AB | B | A | O | B | B | A | B | A | O | ||
| Possible blood type of child | ||||||||||||
| O | X | X | X | X | X | X | ||||||
| A | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||
| B | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | |||||
| AB | X | X | X | X | ||||||||
When combined with the fact that up to 90% of divorces are begun by the wife, it gives you a whole new understanding of who is acting irresponsibly in marriage, doesn't it?
So, is the overuse of shopping and the pervasiveness of yoga causing the ruin of women?
Increasingly, researchers say yes, as young men women become hooked on arousal, sacrificing their schoolwork and relationships in the pursuit of getting a tech-based buzz.
Every compulsive gambler, alcoholic or drug addict will tell you that they want increasingly more of a game or drink or drug in order to get the same quality of buzz.
The consequences could be dramatic: The excessive use of video games yoga and online porn shopping in pursuit of the next thing is creating a generation of risk-averse guys sex-crazed women who are unable (and unwilling) to navigate the complexities and risks inherent to real-life relationships, school and employment.
Stories about this degeneration are rampant: In 2005, a worker and two shoppers were killed during a Black Friday sale at Walmart. In the same year, an old woman at a Florida Brandsmart was trampled.
... This new kind of human addictive arousal traps users into an expanded present hedonistic time zone. Past and future are distant and remote as the present moment expands to dominate everything. That present scene is totally dynamic, with images changing constantly.
...Young men Women -- who play video games go shopping and use porn yoga the most -- are being digitally neurally rewired in a totally new way that demands constant stimulation. And those delicate, developing brains are being catered to by video games yoga and porn shopping-on-demand, with a click of the mouse, in endless variety.
Such new brains are also totally out of sync in traditional school classes, which are analog, static and interactively passive. Academics are based on applying past lessons to future problems, on planning, on delaying gratifications, on work coming before play and on long-term goal-setting.
Less extreme cases of arousal addiction may go unnoticed or be diagnosed as an attention or mood disorder. But we are in a national, and perhaps global, Guy Girl Disaster Mode that needs to be noticed and solutions advanced to fix a totally novel phenomenon, which will only increase in intensity and breadth without the concerted efforts of educators, gamemakers shopping malls, parents, guys and gals.
It's time to press play and get started reversing these trends.
Now that the connections have been revealed, I expect everyone to get very, very concerned about about women, shopping and yoga. Fathers will warn their wives and daughters to stay away from really big sales (alright, they already do that). Priests will preach about the dangers of shopping and yoga. I know this article will be passed around all the Catholic sites, and the whole Catholic community will rise up to cluck and wring their hands over the ruin of women.
Yeah, right.
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Woman's Work
Elizabeth Wurtzel, a woman writing for The Atlantic, argues that raising children is not work since no one will pay you to do it. Real feminism, according to her understanding, is to have employment that is equal in respect and pay to that of a man.
As I pointed out in previous posts, this conclusion makes sense.
Prior to the increases in hygiene and nutrition that occurred along with the industrial revolution, women had a very tough job. They had to conceive, carry, bear and raise children. Roughly 20% to 30% of their children would not survive the first year. In certain subpopulations, upwards of 75% would not survive long enough to get married themselves. Women had to bear enough children to compensate for those losses. And they only had about 12 years to get it done. That's how long, on average, a marriage lasted before either the father or the mother or both, were dead. So, if any children were to survive to adulthood, women had to be pregnant on a fairly regular basis.
If a crop of wheat failed, it meant everyone in the village would starve for a year.
If a crop of children failed, it meant the village disappeared.
Women's work mattered.
In 2012, a child is about 40 times more likely to survive to adulthood than it was in 1812.
That's an enormous increase in the efficiency of women's work. When production becomes more efficient, both the price and the value of the good drops.
It used to take enormous skill and luck to bring a crop of children to maturity, and able to enter their own marriages. It takes no skill to produce and raise them anymore. Children are no longer valuable.
So, the social value of women's work - raising children - is very much lower than it was in the past. Modern medicine, nutrition and production have made raising children among the lowest paying of occupations. If women want to remain valuable in the eyes of society, they have to switch from child-bearing and child-raising to a more difficult occupation.
Thus, the liberal fixation with "the war on women" has a real economic basis. Those who fixate on this sense that women's work is not valued as it used to be, that it can never again be valued as it was. The only way it will ever again be perceived as "hard work" is if we involuntarily return to a 75% loss rate before maturity.
And this explains the interest in keeping abortion legal. The economists attempted to increase the value of women's work by legalizing abortion. Abortion was legalized at the end of the post-war baby boom - when infant mortality rates had dropped to about 20 per thousand and the country was awash in kids. Too many kids. The cost of children had to be raised.
Abortion imposes an arbitrary 30% loss rate on children before birth. Put another way, legal abortion has returned our infant mortality rates to pre-industrial levels. Demographers do not point this out publicly. It belies the idea of our being "medically advanced." It's embarrassing.
It also hasn't worked. Women's work, the raising of children, is still too efficient. Survival rate of born children to maturity is still 40 times higher than it was two centuries ago. Attempts have been made to allow infanticide, but those haven't yet been successful. Given most people's squeamishness about murdering visible children, it is unlikely to have the necessary levels of success anytime soon.
On some level, Elizabeth Wurtzel and her friends recognize all of this. They insist there is another gambit, a better gambit, that women must employ: end participation in the "women's work" game entirely. They got out of the child-bearing business and they encourage other women to get out of the business as well. Women control the means of production, but too many women refuse to quit producing. From Wurtzel's point of view, women having children are traitors to their sex because their refusal to raise the clearing price of children by limiting supply is reducing the general value of "women's work" throughout society.
You see, even if Wurtzel's work has nothing to do with children, the very fact that so many women do want to have children encourages her employer to treat her as someone who is statistically likely to abandon her job in exchange for pregnancy. Men are statistically unlikely to do that, so men don't get profiled this way. Stay-at-home moms encourage employers to "profile" all women.
In order to get around this perception, there have been various attempts to divorce women from child-bearing and child-raising entirely. Free or low-cost child care, cradle-to-18 "schooling", "it takes a village" sloganeering, all kinds of methods have been used to break the mother-child bond, to get all the women into the public workforce, to get them out of the piece-work of bearing and raising children. If it were successful, this would allow the annual child crop to be undertaken entirely by a regulated industry or the government. This is the goal. This is ultimately why research into artificial wombs, artificial gametes, etc., is subsidized and encouraged.
But we don't have artificial wombs yet. Ultimately, employers are not wrong to profile. Some women really do need to leave the public workforce and produce children if the nation is to survive. Like the pre-industrial village, a nation without children disappears. The wage gap cannot be avoided.
But there is also irony here. While there is, indeed, a wage-gap, it only amounts to about 5 cents on the dollar. As Wurtz herself points out, women have already taken advantage of the efficiencies. 70% of women with children work. Fully employed mothers spend 86% as much time with their children as unemployed moms. How is that possible? How can a woman who spends 40 hours a week working spend "86% as much time with their children as unemployed moms"? Well, nowadays the children work too. They're at school thirty-five hours a week.
So, how much is raising children worth? Apparently, about five cents on the dollar. But there is another way to raise that price.
Wurtz, in her fixation on the corporate world, misses an option that many women have already figured out. Home-based businesses can be worth the time if the units produced are hand-crafted and high-demand. Artisan hand-crafted children, also known as homeschooled children, are becoming more popular precisely because they return value to "women's work." If Wurtz were a real feminist, she would promote homeschooling as a real alternative. If she were a real feminist.
As I pointed out in previous posts, this conclusion makes sense.
Prior to the increases in hygiene and nutrition that occurred along with the industrial revolution, women had a very tough job. They had to conceive, carry, bear and raise children. Roughly 20% to 30% of their children would not survive the first year. In certain subpopulations, upwards of 75% would not survive long enough to get married themselves. Women had to bear enough children to compensate for those losses. And they only had about 12 years to get it done. That's how long, on average, a marriage lasted before either the father or the mother or both, were dead. So, if any children were to survive to adulthood, women had to be pregnant on a fairly regular basis.
If a crop of wheat failed, it meant everyone in the village would starve for a year.
If a crop of children failed, it meant the village disappeared.
Women's work mattered.
In 2012, a child is about 40 times more likely to survive to adulthood than it was in 1812.
That's an enormous increase in the efficiency of women's work. When production becomes more efficient, both the price and the value of the good drops.
It used to take enormous skill and luck to bring a crop of children to maturity, and able to enter their own marriages. It takes no skill to produce and raise them anymore. Children are no longer valuable.
So, the social value of women's work - raising children - is very much lower than it was in the past. Modern medicine, nutrition and production have made raising children among the lowest paying of occupations. If women want to remain valuable in the eyes of society, they have to switch from child-bearing and child-raising to a more difficult occupation.
Thus, the liberal fixation with "the war on women" has a real economic basis. Those who fixate on this sense that women's work is not valued as it used to be, that it can never again be valued as it was. The only way it will ever again be perceived as "hard work" is if we involuntarily return to a 75% loss rate before maturity.
And this explains the interest in keeping abortion legal. The economists attempted to increase the value of women's work by legalizing abortion. Abortion was legalized at the end of the post-war baby boom - when infant mortality rates had dropped to about 20 per thousand and the country was awash in kids. Too many kids. The cost of children had to be raised.
Abortion imposes an arbitrary 30% loss rate on children before birth. Put another way, legal abortion has returned our infant mortality rates to pre-industrial levels. Demographers do not point this out publicly. It belies the idea of our being "medically advanced." It's embarrassing.
It also hasn't worked. Women's work, the raising of children, is still too efficient. Survival rate of born children to maturity is still 40 times higher than it was two centuries ago. Attempts have been made to allow infanticide, but those haven't yet been successful. Given most people's squeamishness about murdering visible children, it is unlikely to have the necessary levels of success anytime soon.
On some level, Elizabeth Wurtzel and her friends recognize all of this. They insist there is another gambit, a better gambit, that women must employ: end participation in the "women's work" game entirely. They got out of the child-bearing business and they encourage other women to get out of the business as well. Women control the means of production, but too many women refuse to quit producing. From Wurtzel's point of view, women having children are traitors to their sex because their refusal to raise the clearing price of children by limiting supply is reducing the general value of "women's work" throughout society.
You see, even if Wurtzel's work has nothing to do with children, the very fact that so many women do want to have children encourages her employer to treat her as someone who is statistically likely to abandon her job in exchange for pregnancy. Men are statistically unlikely to do that, so men don't get profiled this way. Stay-at-home moms encourage employers to "profile" all women.
In order to get around this perception, there have been various attempts to divorce women from child-bearing and child-raising entirely. Free or low-cost child care, cradle-to-18 "schooling", "it takes a village" sloganeering, all kinds of methods have been used to break the mother-child bond, to get all the women into the public workforce, to get them out of the piece-work of bearing and raising children. If it were successful, this would allow the annual child crop to be undertaken entirely by a regulated industry or the government. This is the goal. This is ultimately why research into artificial wombs, artificial gametes, etc., is subsidized and encouraged.
But we don't have artificial wombs yet. Ultimately, employers are not wrong to profile. Some women really do need to leave the public workforce and produce children if the nation is to survive. Like the pre-industrial village, a nation without children disappears. The wage gap cannot be avoided.
But there is also irony here. While there is, indeed, a wage-gap, it only amounts to about 5 cents on the dollar. As Wurtz herself points out, women have already taken advantage of the efficiencies. 70% of women with children work. Fully employed mothers spend 86% as much time with their children as unemployed moms. How is that possible? How can a woman who spends 40 hours a week working spend "86% as much time with their children as unemployed moms"? Well, nowadays the children work too. They're at school thirty-five hours a week.
So, how much is raising children worth? Apparently, about five cents on the dollar. But there is another way to raise that price.
Wurtz, in her fixation on the corporate world, misses an option that many women have already figured out. Home-based businesses can be worth the time if the units produced are hand-crafted and high-demand. Artisan hand-crafted children, also known as homeschooled children, are becoming more popular precisely because they return value to "women's work." If Wurtz were a real feminist, she would promote homeschooling as a real alternative. If she were a real feminist.
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Immaturity, Thy Name Is Woman
Recently, a news story about men, video games and porn has been making the rounds.
Every time it is posted somewhere, everyone clucks with concern over the absolute fools that men are making of themselves.
Women, especially Catholic Women (tm), write despairing blogs about the immature male, especially the immature Catholic male. You know the one - he refuses to commit, to settle down, to pop the question, even to date whichever unhappy Catholic woman happens to be writing the blog that day.
It's all his fault. He's using porn, playing World of Warcraft, going to work, instead of paying attention to her. Damnably beastly of him.
The whole thing reminds me of nothing so much as the world-wide concern about the welfare of Catholic children.
You know the drill - sexual abuse by public school teachers, rabbis, atheists, fast food managers, swimming coaches, football coaches is largely ignored or considered one-off events: odd and unusual. But sexual abuse of Catholic children by priests!!! That's a consistent, continuing abuse that all people are always concerned about.
So, everyone is deeply concerned about immature men, immature Catholic men.
But why don't we get concerned about the way CATHOLIC WOMEN are harming themselves and society?
Let's take one example: divorce.
Women initiate divorce more often than men.
In fact, women initiate divorce over 60% of the time.
If both spouses are college-educated, women initiate divorce 90% of the time.
This is important.
Everyone knows that women and children are more likely to be poor.
No one knows that it is the women who deliberately impoverish their own children.
And why did women financially destroy their own lives and the lives of their children?
Well, these women wanted to find their identity!
It looks like that whole Teen Mom show could extend the age of female participants to about 50 without changing its emotional approach to life one whit.
You know, in ages past, we had a specific word to describe this approach to life: hysteria. "Hystera" is the Greek word for "uterus", the idea being that women are illogical because they let their wombs rule them rather than their rationality. Today, it is considered bad form to lodge such accusations against women. On the other hand, it is perfectly acceptable... nay... it is considered the height of hilarity to imply that a man was thinking with his little head instead of his big one.
Of course, putting it that way is considered crude.
The enlightened, educated way of reversing the stereotype is to ask why men, especially Catholic men, are so wrapped up in pornography and video games.
So, we ask why men, especially Catholic men, are so immature.
But we are no longer allowed to ask why women, especially Catholic women, are so immature.
But don't these questions deserve to be asked?
How can we stop the rampant immaturity, the hypergamic hysteria, among women that is on display in this divorce culture of ours? Why do we allow women to ruin modern society this way? How can we wean women off their mindless pursuit of "self expression" and "self-identity"?
Undoubtedly, men are avoiding commitment to these hordes of immature women for very good reason.
Maybe the problem isn't that men are immature, but that immature women flock around them, whining for a date, for a ring, for a husband ... and when they get it? They divorce the man, pick up the alimony paycheck, and go looking for their identity, which they apparently lost somewhere on the way to the altar.
Obviously, given these divorce statistics, we need to start a national conversation, a national movement to help women stop their narcissistic behaviours.
We have endless men's groups to wean men off of pornography.
Where are the women's groups that wean women off of divorce and their motivation for wanting a divorce?
Where is Narcissists Anonymous?
UPDATE:
I nearly forgot to add this little tidbit in.
Blood bank testing inadvertently shows that 28% of children don't have the Dad they think they do.
Gives you a whole new understanding of who is acting irresponsibly, doesn't it?
And that's just the children in families with serious family medical issues. The blood banks figured it out because the families had to go to a blood bank and test for a possible transfusion for a family member. What are the rates in other kinds of families?
You see, this was a blood bank study, and blood bank studies can be fooled.
Let's just take the most common markers - ABO and Rh.
A, B and Rh are all dominant.
O is regressive.
A, B and Rh+ all indicate that certain proteins exist on the red blood cell's surface.
O and Rh- means those proteins aren't there.
So, if Dad is O and Mom is O, but the kid is A, B or AB, then that child clearly came from a different dad.
He has proteins on his red blood cells that couldn't come from Mom or "Dad."
Same with Rh. If Dad is O- and Mom is O-, but the kid is O+, then daddy don't live at that house.
He's got proteins from somebody else.
But what if Dad is A, Mom is B or O, and the kid is O?
Well, we can't tell from just the blood test. Dad may actually be AO. And if Mom had a fling with a Type O man, you wouldn't be able to tell from the AB blood test.
Same with Rh - if Mom is Rh+, Mom can have a fling with ANYONE and the Rh factor wouldn't tell.
So, using only the markers that blood banks can say, without shadow of a doubt, that Dad is a cuckold, 28% of fathers are being cuckolded.
But you won't see an article wringing it's hands about female flings based on these facts.
Well, except for this one.
Every time it is posted somewhere, everyone clucks with concern over the absolute fools that men are making of themselves.
Women, especially Catholic Women (tm), write despairing blogs about the immature male, especially the immature Catholic male. You know the one - he refuses to commit, to settle down, to pop the question, even to date whichever unhappy Catholic woman happens to be writing the blog that day.
It's all his fault. He's using porn, playing World of Warcraft, going to work, instead of paying attention to her. Damnably beastly of him.
The whole thing reminds me of nothing so much as the world-wide concern about the welfare of Catholic children.
You know the drill - sexual abuse by public school teachers, rabbis, atheists, fast food managers, swimming coaches, football coaches is largely ignored or considered one-off events: odd and unusual. But sexual abuse of Catholic children by priests!!! That's a consistent, continuing abuse that all people are always concerned about.
So, everyone is deeply concerned about immature men, immature Catholic men.
But why don't we get concerned about the way CATHOLIC WOMEN are harming themselves and society?
Let's take one example: divorce.
Women initiate divorce more often than men.
In fact, women initiate divorce over 60% of the time.
If both spouses are college-educated, women initiate divorce 90% of the time.
"The majority of midlife divorces are initiated by women. Don't believe it? In the AARP survey, 66 percent of women reported that they asked for the divorce, compared with 41 percent of men. And men more often than women were caught off-guard by their divorce.."
So, why are women ruining their own lives and the lives of their husbands and children? After all, women who divorce are much more likely to be single head of households, and single households are largely impoverished.
"The perceived benefits of divorce differ by gender. Women were far more likely than men to say that having their own self-identity was a top reward.... 43 percent of women said they emerged from the split against remarriage. Only 33 percent of men said they wouldn't remarry."
This is important.
Everyone knows that women and children are more likely to be poor.
No one knows that it is the women who deliberately impoverish their own children.
And why did women financially destroy their own lives and the lives of their children?
Well, these women wanted to find their identity!
It looks like that whole Teen Mom show could extend the age of female participants to about 50 without changing its emotional approach to life one whit.
You know, in ages past, we had a specific word to describe this approach to life: hysteria. "Hystera" is the Greek word for "uterus", the idea being that women are illogical because they let their wombs rule them rather than their rationality. Today, it is considered bad form to lodge such accusations against women. On the other hand, it is perfectly acceptable... nay... it is considered the height of hilarity to imply that a man was thinking with his little head instead of his big one.
Of course, putting it that way is considered crude.
The enlightened, educated way of reversing the stereotype is to ask why men, especially Catholic men, are so wrapped up in pornography and video games.
So, we ask why men, especially Catholic men, are so immature.
But we are no longer allowed to ask why women, especially Catholic women, are so immature.
But don't these questions deserve to be asked?
How can we stop the rampant immaturity, the hypergamic hysteria, among women that is on display in this divorce culture of ours? Why do we allow women to ruin modern society this way? How can we wean women off their mindless pursuit of "self expression" and "self-identity"?
Undoubtedly, men are avoiding commitment to these hordes of immature women for very good reason.
Maybe the problem isn't that men are immature, but that immature women flock around them, whining for a date, for a ring, for a husband ... and when they get it? They divorce the man, pick up the alimony paycheck, and go looking for their identity, which they apparently lost somewhere on the way to the altar.
Obviously, given these divorce statistics, we need to start a national conversation, a national movement to help women stop their narcissistic behaviours.
We have endless men's groups to wean men off of pornography.
Where are the women's groups that wean women off of divorce and their motivation for wanting a divorce?
Where is Narcissists Anonymous?
UPDATE:
I nearly forgot to add this little tidbit in.
Blood bank testing inadvertently shows that 28% of children don't have the Dad they think they do.
Gives you a whole new understanding of who is acting irresponsibly, doesn't it?
And that's just the children in families with serious family medical issues. The blood banks figured it out because the families had to go to a blood bank and test for a possible transfusion for a family member. What are the rates in other kinds of families?
You see, this was a blood bank study, and blood bank studies can be fooled.
Let's just take the most common markers - ABO and Rh.
A, B and Rh are all dominant.
O is regressive.
A, B and Rh+ all indicate that certain proteins exist on the red blood cell's surface.
O and Rh- means those proteins aren't there.
So, if Dad is O and Mom is O, but the kid is A, B or AB, then that child clearly came from a different dad.
He has proteins on his red blood cells that couldn't come from Mom or "Dad."
Same with Rh. If Dad is O- and Mom is O-, but the kid is O+, then daddy don't live at that house.
He's got proteins from somebody else.
But what if Dad is A, Mom is B or O, and the kid is O?
Well, we can't tell from just the blood test. Dad may actually be AO. And if Mom had a fling with a Type O man, you wouldn't be able to tell from the AB blood test.
Same with Rh - if Mom is Rh+, Mom can have a fling with ANYONE and the Rh factor wouldn't tell.
So, using only the markers that blood banks can say, without shadow of a doubt, that Dad is a cuckold, 28% of fathers are being cuckolded.
But you won't see an article wringing it's hands about female flings based on these facts.
Well, except for this one.
Saturday, June 09, 2012
The Curious Case of World Population
No matter what else one may argue, one thing is clear: Western culture doesn't value babies. At one time, it did. What changed?
Let's take a look.
In ancient pagan Rome, average life expectancy at birth was about 25 years of age. If the child survived to its 10th birthday, life expectancy was 51.That average life expectancy was pretty much standard around the world for the next two millennia.
What does that mean?
It means a lot of children died before the age of ten.
Infant mortality is generally defined as the number of children per 1000 who die before their first year.Modern estimates indicate that for pre-industrial societies between 200 and 300 infants per 1000 would die in their first year.
In the early 1600s in England, two-thirds of children died before their fourth birthday. 40% of children in colonial America didn't reach age 18.
In 1740's London, 75% died before they were five.
Maternal death was significant, but not predominant. It accounted for about 10% of deaths for women between the ages of 15 and 44, that is, four to seven women died per thousand births (tending more towards four than seven).
The more children a woman had, the more likely she was to survive into old age. Only celibate women lived longer then those who had more than five children.
Age at First Marriage: Ancient and Medieval
For most of human history, parents chose the spouses for their children.
In the Roman Empire, the age of first marriage for pagan girls was 12-15, pagan men 26. Christian women were nearly 19 at first marriage, while Christian men were 27.
Medieval marriages tended to be later: females 23 and males 28, but younger marriages were not uncommon.
St. Rita married at age 12. The Blessed Virgin is assumed to have been about 12 to 14. Chrysostom said young men should marry as soon as possible (before they turn 20), to keep them out of the whore houses and theaters. Edward Longshanks married at 15 to his 13-year old second cousin, Eleanor of Castile. Only six of of the 14 children he and Eleanor had survived.
Upwards of one-quarter of the medieval population were under religious vows and therefore celibate.
Age at First Marriage: Colonial Americas
In the southern United States, the legal age of marriage for females was 14.
In colonial America, one in ten women age 16 were married. Average age of marriage for women was 19. Over the next 150 years, it would slowly rise to 23, dropping back down to 20 only briefly around 1960.
In Catholic colonial Mexico, legal age of marriage was set by canon law at 12, as it had been for centuries In Mexico, over 50% of the females in the non-Spanish population were married by age 16, over 50% of the males married by age 18.
Marriage Didn't Last Long
Most families lost at least one parent by the time the eldest child reached 21 years of age. Marriages lasted on average less than 12 years because, about 50% of the time, one of the spouses was dead by what would have been the 12th year of marriage.
In comparison, newlyweds in 2006 had a 57% chance of being divorced before their 15th anniversary.
Think about this.
It doesn't mean that modern sacramental marriages shouldn't last, but it does mean that Christ is asking modern spouses to do something today that earlier generations largely didn't have to do. Earlier generations had to watch their children and spouse die. We must help our children and spouse live.
Up to 40% Illegitimacy
Prior to the 1700s, roughly 20% of all women in England were pregnant at the time of first marriage. By 1750, that had risen to 40%. This wasn't just the fault of the Reformation.
Catholic Spain was considered missionary territory by St. Ignatius in part because fornication was common and accepted. Catholic Mexico had a 40% rate of illegitimacy in several cities.
Fertility
American women had unusually high fertility. Whereas English family had an average of three children per household (four if you were rich), Americans had seven to nine. Mothers typically hired wetnurses. Only five to seven children would survive to adulthood.
From 1890 to 1960, the age of marriage in the United States dropped.
From 1960 to now, it has climbed without interruption.
Infant mortality dropped in all countries around the world. In the United States, around roughly 1900, it dropped from 167 per thousand to the current 7 per thousand. This was fairly typical. By 1967, when we were awash in babies, we legalized abortion in order to crank the infant mortality rate back up to medieval levels.
As a result of increased infant survival, life expectancy across all countries throughout the world went up. Income across all populations around the world went up at the same time.
Today, we marry later, our spouses largely don't die, our children don't die (so we have to murder them via abortion), and we are incredibly richer.
Malthus Makes An Entrance
Thomas Malthus, the first man to worry about the problem of overpopulation, lived in a society that valued women and children. He believed that the wealthier you were, the more children you would have. Between 1798 and 1826, he published several successive editions of his Essay on the Principle of Population. He saw the rising affluence of England and of the West as a positive danger precisely because he thought rich people would have more children survive to adulthood than poor people did.
He couldn't imagine a society that would actively kill children - quite the opposite. He knew that parents would try to preserve the lives of their children.
He knew, with rising affluence, they would succeed. Their very success would create the danger - the rich people would over-run the earth with their children.
As rich people caused the population to rise, people would become more impoverished than they had to begin with, and famine would sweep the land. That's what he saw.
If we judge by Malthusian consequences, then nothing makes sense.
Counter-Intuitive
In fact, if we argue that the world of 1800 was overpopulated because of its impoverished population, then we must conclude the world has grown less and less overpopulated since 1800.
After all, the world has grown from 1 billion to nearly 7 billion in population, yet instead of growing poorer, every corner of the world has become richer. Even the poorest billion people out of the current seven billion live longer than did the richest one percent of that 1 billion alive in 1800. The remaining six billion alive today are inestimably richer than anyone was when the earth held only 1 billion.
Thus, judging by relative affluence, we are growing less overpopulated with time.
How is this possible?
As the population increases, as the number of human minds increase, technology improves. We are able to more fully use and spread the wealth of the world across the population. The tipping point was apparently 1 billion people. It just gets better from here on out.
There is, of course, one problem.
We may have become very wealthy, but we've lost our self-respect.
Earth Doesn't Need Women
When we were poor, when parents and children both died young, when family life was hard, we valued it. Now that we have grown rich, we have decided not to share our riches with the next generation.
Instead, we turned back the clock.
In the entirety of human history, century after century, millennium after millennium, there has been only one 70-year period, from about 1890 to about 1960, when the infant mortality rate fell below 100 per 1000 births anywhere in the world. It went from about 140 in 1900 to about 20 in 1960. For the first time in human history, we kept virtually all the children we conceived.
We saw what we had made, and we didn't like it. So, by pill, coil and cannula, we deliberately re-instated the pre-industrial infant death rates.
We currently abort about 230 babies per 1000 live births. This is the same infant death ratio one would see 1000 years ago in medieval Europe, before the advent of modern obstetrics, hospitals, germ theory. There's only one difference: we aren't watching them die from disease and famine - we're actively killing them. Before birth when we can, after birth if we must.
Family formation rates, fertility rates, child-bearing, is uniformly dropping, not just in rich countries but in every country in the world. And it has been doing this since the middle of the 1800s. You see, every country is getting richer. And, contrary to Malthus' expectations, rich people really don't want children.
Follow The Money
People the world over no longer want children, we want paychecks.
Just ask us. There's no need to live for children because family is no longer a life and death proposition.
But it gets worse.
What Will The Future Bring?
Looking over the last 150 years, we can see our social values have changed enormously.
Sex selection abortion is already rampant in India and China. We can't seem to pass a law against it in the United States. Why? Because women are the bearers of children. Women are dangerous as far as Malthusians are concerned.
Today, we've already invented IVF. We are working to perfect the artificial gamete, the artificial womb, and the sex robot. Where do you think all that will lead?
Well, from the viewpoint of population control, it would be much better if we had no women at all. If women were gone, then all procreation could be regulated and controlled through industry and government. And this future is quite possible.
We could easily get to the point where most men settle for well-crafted robots, and living women are considered the peculiar pass-time of certain well-off gentlemen who like that kind of thing, in much the same way that some men keep horses or prefer golf to bowling. If you think this impossible, consider all the men in China and India who will never marry. There is a market for artificial women. As the technology improves, the market will grow.
This is what happens when we grow rich without growing holy.
This is what happens when we pursue social justice but ignore life issues.
Everyone gets rich, but our values... change.
Let's take a look.
Pre-Industrial Family Life
In ancient pagan Rome, average life expectancy at birth was about 25 years of age. If the child survived to its 10th birthday, life expectancy was 51.That average life expectancy was pretty much standard around the world for the next two millennia.
What does that mean?
It means a lot of children died before the age of ten.
Infant mortality is generally defined as the number of children per 1000 who die before their first year.Modern estimates indicate that for pre-industrial societies between 200 and 300 infants per 1000 would die in their first year.
In the early 1600s in England, two-thirds of children died before their fourth birthday. 40% of children in colonial America didn't reach age 18.
In 1740's London, 75% died before they were five.
Maternal death was significant, but not predominant. It accounted for about 10% of deaths for women between the ages of 15 and 44, that is, four to seven women died per thousand births (tending more towards four than seven).
The more children a woman had, the more likely she was to survive into old age. Only celibate women lived longer then those who had more than five children.
Age at First Marriage: Ancient and Medieval
For most of human history, parents chose the spouses for their children.
In the Roman Empire, the age of first marriage for pagan girls was 12-15, pagan men 26. Christian women were nearly 19 at first marriage, while Christian men were 27.
Medieval marriages tended to be later: females 23 and males 28, but younger marriages were not uncommon.
St. Rita married at age 12. The Blessed Virgin is assumed to have been about 12 to 14. Chrysostom said young men should marry as soon as possible (before they turn 20), to keep them out of the whore houses and theaters. Edward Longshanks married at 15 to his 13-year old second cousin, Eleanor of Castile. Only six of of the 14 children he and Eleanor had survived.
Upwards of one-quarter of the medieval population were under religious vows and therefore celibate.
Age at First Marriage: Colonial Americas
In the southern United States, the legal age of marriage for females was 14.
In colonial America, one in ten women age 16 were married. Average age of marriage for women was 19. Over the next 150 years, it would slowly rise to 23, dropping back down to 20 only briefly around 1960.
In Catholic colonial Mexico, legal age of marriage was set by canon law at 12, as it had been for centuries In Mexico, over 50% of the females in the non-Spanish population were married by age 16, over 50% of the males married by age 18.
Marriage Didn't Last Long
Most families lost at least one parent by the time the eldest child reached 21 years of age. Marriages lasted on average less than 12 years because, about 50% of the time, one of the spouses was dead by what would have been the 12th year of marriage.
In comparison, newlyweds in 2006 had a 57% chance of being divorced before their 15th anniversary.
Think about this.
It doesn't mean that modern sacramental marriages shouldn't last, but it does mean that Christ is asking modern spouses to do something today that earlier generations largely didn't have to do. Earlier generations had to watch their children and spouse die. We must help our children and spouse live.
Up to 40% Illegitimacy
Prior to the 1700s, roughly 20% of all women in England were pregnant at the time of first marriage. By 1750, that had risen to 40%. This wasn't just the fault of the Reformation.
Catholic Spain was considered missionary territory by St. Ignatius in part because fornication was common and accepted. Catholic Mexico had a 40% rate of illegitimacy in several cities.
Fertility
American women had unusually high fertility. Whereas English family had an average of three children per household (four if you were rich), Americans had seven to nine. Mothers typically hired wetnurses. Only five to seven children would survive to adulthood.
Summary of the Old Days
From Adam and Eve through Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, Gregory the Great, the Muslim invasion of Spain, the Viking invasions, the Crusades, the Black Death, the Protestant Reformation, the Council of Trent, the Little Ice Age... all the way until 1890, this is what it meant to live in a family.- Your parents decided who you would marry.
- Wealthier people tending to marry earlier since they had the means.
- About half of your children would die before they reached maturity.
- You or your spouse would be dead before surviving children reached maturity.
- Poor people tended to have fewer children than rich people.
- Most people (80% of the population) were farmers.
- Forming a family, keeping the family, raising the family, was incredibly hard work.
- The man sowed, raised and harvested the crops.
- The woman carried, bore and raised the children.
- You were as likely to lose your crop of children to famine as you were to lose your crop of wheat to insects, fungus or weather. A woman's work was just as valuable to society as a man's.
Family Life In the Last 150 Years
The germ theory of disease was not even considered reasonable until Pasteur's work in the 1860s. It did not become firmly ensconced as a science until Koch developed his postulates in 1890. That, along with industrialization and advances in transportation - and therefore advances in transport of food - changed everything. (As a point of contact, Leo XIII released his famous social justice encyclical, Rerum Novarum, in 1891).From 1890 to 1960, the age of marriage in the United States dropped.
From 1960 to now, it has climbed without interruption.
Infant mortality dropped in all countries around the world. In the United States, around roughly 1900, it dropped from 167 per thousand to the current 7 per thousand. This was fairly typical. By 1967, when we were awash in babies, we legalized abortion in order to crank the infant mortality rate back up to medieval levels.
As a result of increased infant survival, life expectancy across all countries throughout the world went up. Income across all populations around the world went up at the same time.
Today, we marry later, our spouses largely don't die, our children don't die (so we have to murder them via abortion), and we are incredibly richer.
Malthus Makes An Entrance
Thomas Malthus, the first man to worry about the problem of overpopulation, lived in a society that valued women and children. He believed that the wealthier you were, the more children you would have. Between 1798 and 1826, he published several successive editions of his Essay on the Principle of Population. He saw the rising affluence of England and of the West as a positive danger precisely because he thought rich people would have more children survive to adulthood than poor people did.
He couldn't imagine a society that would actively kill children - quite the opposite. He knew that parents would try to preserve the lives of their children.
He knew, with rising affluence, they would succeed. Their very success would create the danger - the rich people would over-run the earth with their children.
As rich people caused the population to rise, people would become more impoverished than they had to begin with, and famine would sweep the land. That's what he saw.
If we judge by Malthusian consequences, then nothing makes sense.
Counter-Intuitive
In fact, if we argue that the world of 1800 was overpopulated because of its impoverished population, then we must conclude the world has grown less and less overpopulated since 1800.
After all, the world has grown from 1 billion to nearly 7 billion in population, yet instead of growing poorer, every corner of the world has become richer. Even the poorest billion people out of the current seven billion live longer than did the richest one percent of that 1 billion alive in 1800. The remaining six billion alive today are inestimably richer than anyone was when the earth held only 1 billion.
Thus, judging by relative affluence, we are growing less overpopulated with time.
How is this possible?
As the population increases, as the number of human minds increase, technology improves. We are able to more fully use and spread the wealth of the world across the population. The tipping point was apparently 1 billion people. It just gets better from here on out.
There is, of course, one problem.
We may have become very wealthy, but we've lost our self-respect.
Earth Doesn't Need Women
When we were poor, when parents and children both died young, when family life was hard, we valued it. Now that we have grown rich, we have decided not to share our riches with the next generation.
Instead, we turned back the clock.
In the entirety of human history, century after century, millennium after millennium, there has been only one 70-year period, from about 1890 to about 1960, when the infant mortality rate fell below 100 per 1000 births anywhere in the world. It went from about 140 in 1900 to about 20 in 1960. For the first time in human history, we kept virtually all the children we conceived.
We saw what we had made, and we didn't like it. So, by pill, coil and cannula, we deliberately re-instated the pre-industrial infant death rates.
We currently abort about 230 babies per 1000 live births. This is the same infant death ratio one would see 1000 years ago in medieval Europe, before the advent of modern obstetrics, hospitals, germ theory. There's only one difference: we aren't watching them die from disease and famine - we're actively killing them. Before birth when we can, after birth if we must.
Family formation rates, fertility rates, child-bearing, is uniformly dropping, not just in rich countries but in every country in the world. And it has been doing this since the middle of the 1800s. You see, every country is getting richer. And, contrary to Malthus' expectations, rich people really don't want children.
Follow The Money
People the world over no longer want children, we want paychecks.
Just ask us. There's no need to live for children because family is no longer a life and death proposition.
But it gets worse.
What Will The Future Bring?
Looking over the last 150 years, we can see our social values have changed enormously.
Sex selection abortion is already rampant in India and China. We can't seem to pass a law against it in the United States. Why? Because women are the bearers of children. Women are dangerous as far as Malthusians are concerned.
Today, we've already invented IVF. We are working to perfect the artificial gamete, the artificial womb, and the sex robot. Where do you think all that will lead?
Well, from the viewpoint of population control, it would be much better if we had no women at all. If women were gone, then all procreation could be regulated and controlled through industry and government. And this future is quite possible.
We could easily get to the point where most men settle for well-crafted robots, and living women are considered the peculiar pass-time of certain well-off gentlemen who like that kind of thing, in much the same way that some men keep horses or prefer golf to bowling. If you think this impossible, consider all the men in China and India who will never marry. There is a market for artificial women. As the technology improves, the market will grow.
This is what happens when we grow rich without growing holy.
This is what happens when we pursue social justice but ignore life issues.
Everyone gets rich, but our values... change.