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“you have to have strong women in order to deal with masculine men“

Camilla Paglia has the right of it.  Sure, Ezra describes the lay of the University land, but what is the root cause? A root cause?

Obviously, we’re in a time now where parenting is in crisis, I would think. The reason we have all these whiny, super-sensitive girls on campus that’ll run shrieking at the slightest thing that offends their ears or drag mattresses onto the stage at commencement exercises, the reason we have that is because the parents have not prepared them for real life. In other words, they’ve been raised in this bourgeois, pampered cocoon, so I think there’s been a tremendous failure of parenting…

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And DANGEROUSLY wrong to boot.  At Steve’s post “Has Nashua Democrat Rep. Ken Gidge Found a Magic Money Tree?“, Horrigan The Uber-Progressive decided to haul out that old Leftism meme that Government can’t be wrong because WE ARE THE GOVERNMENT:

The United States of America is a republic: we ARE the government. I am not saying the government is perfect, I am not saying it’s not too big, but it’s not some alien enemy force.

Usually Horrigan’s comments are totally off-topic and irrelevant but here he brings up a totally falsity (to coin a word) similar to the Democrat “Government is that thing we all belong to” (and to many of us on the right, it confirms what the Left has done with Govt – it now owns us with no choices).  We ARE the government has that same whiff of collectivism with a dash of “because we ARE, we cannot be wrong, can we?”

The problem, is that it is a totally false premise: we are NOT the Government and nor did the Founders ever have this as a vision.  And he laid in the rebuttal to his argument in his own comment.

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In Iceland, some 67 percent of babies are born to parents who are not married. A combination of generous social programs and a secular society have all but made nuptials obsolete—while giving rise to a unique culture of independent motherhood.

Glenn at Instapundit just threw that up there without comment but I just can’t resist.

Years ago, I offered to expand my home so as to have my Mom and step-dad move in with us and I will admit that there self-interest there – I got tired of getting the 3am phone call of “Eldon is hardly breathing again!” (he had COPD).  It was always “Mom, did you call 911?” answered by “No, I called you first”.  While I generally beat the ambulance, I felt it would be more effective for them to be closer (er, we lived in the same town and she was only 10 minutes away). But the pushback was always

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Bosse is the Editorial Editor at the UL and decided to both call out UNH students, who are in serious knowledge deficit, and ridicule them.  Seriously, has secondary education quality dropped so low that they can’t even do the intellectual equivalent of just playing tic-tac-toe and figure out “if you do this, how does it affect this other thing?”.  This caught my eye:

Do they have the courage of their own convictions? Are they willing to divest from fossil fuels themselves?

They should refuse to ride in gasoline-powered cars, or electric vehicles recharged by a grid powered by coal and natural gas. They should put down their phones and tablets made with components shipped from around the world in bulky freighters. They should do their homework by candlelight, using pen and paper. And when they sit at their fancy electric dining table, and eat their food grown hundreds and thousands of miles away, they should realize they too are profiting from the fossil fuel industry.

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“The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.”  – President Obama, Inauguration (2009)

What POSSIBLY go wrong? I guess the Ban The Box activists are going to be proud of this – the real question is whether or not they are willing to personally take responsibility, fiscally or otherwise, if what a lot of us thinking, happens:

FEDS HIRED A CREDIT CARD FRAUD FELON FRESH OUT OF PRISON, NOW HE RUNS A BIG VA PURCHASING UNIT: Trust me, friends, the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Luke Rosiak did not make up this story that captures pretty much everything that is wrong with the Department of Veterans Affairs (and probably the federal bureaucracy in general as well).

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“There are some other trends at work. In the last few decades there has been a growing divide in the United States when it comes to how many recruits different regions provide. A disproportionate number of recruits come from the southern and the Rocky Mountain states. The northeast, upper Midwest, and west coast are much more difficult to recruit from and the recruits are not as good (less education, overweight, bad attitudes).

Recruiters have the hardest time in urban areas. Back in 2005, the Department of Defense concluded that urban high schools were the source of most problems. Not because of leftist teachers in some of those schools trying to keep recruiters out, but because so many potential recruits had to be turned down because of the poor education they had received in those schools. While only a fifth of Americans live outside cities and suburbs, nearly half of the qualified recruits come from these rural areas. What’s strange about all this is that the rural areas spend much less, per pupil, on education but get much better results than urban schools. Part of this can be attributed to differences in cost of living, but a lot of it has to do with simply getting more done with less. Per capita, young people in rural areas are over 20 percent more likely to join the army, than those of the same age in urban areas.

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I am a New Hampshire conservative Independent. I am by no means unique and, in fact, am probably a member of a species that is far more common than most people may realize or care to acknowledge. Over the last several months I have developed distaste for the national Republican Party and it has grown stronger by the day and now, by the minute. I would like to send a few messages to the GOP.

First: Get over yourselves, do what is right for America. Ronald Reagan once said “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.” I believe that if the Gipper were around today to witness the abhorrent behavior of the Republican Party, he would now be saying the same thing about them. He was a decent man, a fair man. I have no doubt that he would be disgusted with how you are acting. You have betrayed the 11th Commandment, “Thou shalt not speak ill of any Republican” time and time again. Although this quote was made popular by Reagan, it was born of a former California Republican Party Chair, George Parkinson. I have no doubt that Ronald Reagan and Mr. Parkinson are turning over in their graves.

Second:  to the national Republican Party members I say – Who the hell do you think you are?

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Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump set his sights on conservative critics who condemn his positions on trade during a rally in West Virginia Thursday.

“I’m a conservative, but the conservatives hate me for suggesting I would dare tax somebody,” Trump said after promising he would punish companies that move overseas with high tariffs when they try to ship products back into the United States.

The GOP has brought it (and him) upon themselves.  They have essentially acted like Progressives in bastardizing the common language to the point where “conservative” has no meaning at all.  Seriously, can anyone look at me (or any of the Groksters) and point and ask “Conservative?” and then do the same to Donald Trump without losing your mind?  Sorry, but it’s not HIS fault but it is the fault of the less-conservative, moderate, or plain-voting-with-Democrats-all-the-time Republicans who apply that adjective to themselves or their BFFs at campaign time.

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Here’s an article about Warren Buffet’s well-known view that the rich should pay more in taxes. His bottom-line argument is, “If you’re in the luckiest 1% of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99%.” I don’t disagree.

My disagreement with Buffet is the implication that being forced to pay more in taxes has any relationship whatsoever with thinking about the rest of humanity. People are not thinking about the rest of humanity when they are being forced to do something. There is no virtue in paying taxes.

This keeps playing out over and over.  First, let’s get one thing straight: “luck” is simply preparation colliding with opportunity.  You have to not only know what to do when opportunity arises but to be able to recognize it in the first place.  Luck can carry you only so far – Buffet is too modest by half.  Most people who are in that 1% (or higher) are ALSO those that have worked their tails off for decades.  Yes, they are different than most of us in their focus, knowledge, and work ethic. But 

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A response to the Left’s “Guns are only designed to kill people” (emphasis mine):

…First, what are guns designed to do? They’re designed to project force at a distance. They do this by propelling a projectile out of the end of a barrel at a velocity sufficient for the task at hand. The higher the velocity, the more force can be projected at further distances. The heavier the projectile, the more force that can be projected at a given velocity. Guns are machines that allow us to effectively project force at a distance.

To clarify, consider the purpose of a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile tipped with a nuclear warhead. What is its purpose?  Much like that of a pistol, it’s to project force at a (great) distance.  But the Minuteman III wasn’t designed to kill people. It was designed to provide deterrence; that is, to stop other people from killing us. No Minuteman III has ever killed a single person, but it was and is used every day to deter attacks on the United States.

This principle is as old as humanity. The most famous adage associated with it is:  Si vis pacem, para bellum (if you wish peace, prepare for war).

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