Children Are The Future

Washington Post is out with a story about the high cost of child care. The title, Average child-care costs exceed in-state college tuitions nationwide, is sure to cause worry lines to form on the faces of new parents.

The average cost of "full-time, center-based child care in the United States" is now $9,589 per year. Despite this, studies often show that children are in environments that are "inadequate for their health and safety," and which "do not promote their cognitive and social-emotional development."

You'd think that dropping your children off into the company of strangers would produce more desirable outcomes.

But no. Not according to the National Association for the Education of Young Children and the National Association for Family Child Care. They are accreditation organizations for child-care businesses.

"Only a small percentage of centers are nationally accredited," the report notes.

Whether or not to use day care is a decision that parents agonize over. They know it's a trade-off. They know that it would be nice to be able to have a parent stay at home all day. They know that those families who can afford a live-in nanny have it good. But they need two incomes to make the mortgage.

And the issue no longer seems to be whether families get financial assistance for day care. It's how much. Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have pledged some form of tax relief or subsidies to new parents.

And that's how it's going to be. But that's not going to make anyone better off. When you subsidize an activity, you get more of it. Subsidies for day care is going to pull more mothers out of the home and into the workplace.

This is federalizing an issue that is the last bastion of liberty, the nuclear family. It will make it necessary for us to have ridiculous licensing requirements and mandatory accreditation of babysitters. In California, you need a license if you take care of children from more than one family.

Soon, there will be hue and cry for national day care standards, like caregiver to child ratio. Three different cabinet-level agencies will be empowered to make inspections of every facility that cares for a child. Is your facility peanut-free? There goes your license!

When you think about day care, it's really just remote hands technical support involving complex autonomous networks. A child is hungry, you feed them. A child scrapes their knee, you bandage it. How long before regulations permit robots to take over some of these tedious, repetitive tasks?

That's not at all Orwellian, is it?

And this brings it all back to trade-offs and social-emotional development. You know how today's college students are so fragile that someone writing Donald Trump's name in chalk will send them scurrying for their safe space? This is a direct result of so many children being supervised in day care.

If you want children that are even less resilient than today's, then, by all means, let's continue to warehouse them all day.

"You Throw Like A Girl!"

There's a new Fox show on tonight, called, Pitch. It's about the first female major league baseball player. It's sugary, predigested baby food that will dispel your notions that boys and girls are genetically different. The message to girls, is, if you throw a lot of rocks when you're little and work your upper body enough, you can get to the Majors.

I wonder what the pitch for this show was. It's for baseball fans? Strike one. They will need CGI to enhance her overhead motion. A pitcher's elbow approaches the speed of sound just before delivery. A ninety-pound actress will never be able to "learn" this.

No, it's for girls being conditioned to believe that they are Mary Sues. Strike two. This audience is vanishingly small, not enough to sustain ratings.

Or maybe it's for lesbians to watch with their turkey-baster conceived bastard sons.

A baseball field is a traditionally male space, and you're not improving the game by sexually integrating it. You're making it worse. Much worse. This isn't Jackie Robinson or Rosa Parks, although they are sure to name-drop them.

This is the girl on the little league team, overcoming adversity with a confident attitude and Serena Williams-levels of testosterone injections.

How are they going to portray the locker room? Players arrive hours before first pitch to prepare and bullshit. They also walk around in their birthday suit or jockstraps. Is she going to parade around with her junk flopping around like a guy would?

They can find somewhere for her to dress, but the manager's office is inside the locker room. After the game, men take showers and bullshit some more. How is little Mary Sue going to bond with her teammates if she has to dress in a separate facility?

Baseball movies have to decide whether they are going to be in the realm of reality, or mostly allegory. In the real world, men belittle each other to bond. How long before she goes to the union and complains about a hostile work environment?

What if her finely-tuned feminist ears pick up one of the male players talking about how he landed a "slump-buster?" That is a cheap single that ends a hitless streak. It's also sexual innuendo to describe how a guy goes on a date with an ugly girl to break his dry spell.

That kind of comment would land the offending player and the team a nice sexual harassment lawsuit.

But let's just assume that a little lady could get a batter out. What happens the rest of the game? The first time a batted ball comes through the, er, box, it would crack her head open. And even pitchers have to bat once in a while. How is she going to advance a runner without getting hurt?

I'm tempted to watch, anyway, just for laughs. And to see the boy who once taunted her with the insult, "you throw like a girl," finally get his comeuppance, as the term comes to be known as a superb compliment.

Gaslighter In Chief

President Obama gave his farewell address to the Congressional Black Caucus on Saturday night, as bombs were exploding in New York and New Jersey. Black voters are a dispirited group this cycle, breaking for Donald Trump in double digits. Maybe that is the hangover from Hillary's "superpredator" comments years ago.

Obama told the crowd that he considered their disloyalty "a personal insult, an insult to my legacy." Perhaps Obama should have spent more time lowering barriers to black achievement and less time pushing antagonistic social issues.

He started the evening in a light-hearted mood, saying, "there's an extra spring in my step tonight." What makes Obama so happy? A favorite tactic of the narcissist is gaslighting, where any natural curiosity about them is portrayed as some sort of obsessive mental illness. Skepticism about Obama's birthplace gets you placed in the bin as a paranoid conspiracy theorist.

"I am so relieved that the whole birther thing is over," he said.

The "birther thing" that his team nurtured for years? I doubt very much he wants it to go away.

"ISIL, North Korea, poverty, climate change — none of those things weighed on my mind — (laughter) — like the validity of my birth certificate."

Why did he frame it this way? Why frame this about his birth certificate rather than his place of birth? Remember, his birth certificate wasn't released until 2011, and its validity still raises doubts.

Obama himself sustained the controversy by waiting three years to release his birth certificate. This has promoted the narrative that wondering where Obama was born was racist. That helps gin up black voter turnout.

The liberal media has promised that the apostasy about Obama's provenance will not go away on their watch. Trump or any of his surrogates should just be captured on video, as often as possible, drinking out of this cup.

The President's college records are still under seal. I wonder if the seal will be broken in time for the opening of the Barack H. Obama Presidential Library.

Harvest Day

The macadamia nut doesn't yield without a fight. The tree's leaves have tiny barbs that prick exposed skin. A ladder must be scaled to pluck a single fruit. The green husk needs to dry out before it can be removed. The shell withstands direct blows with a hammer, and hand-held crackers are useless. A levered nutcracker mounted on a flat surface is the only way.

I compete with several species for the essential nutrients. Birds carry away some, and rats and squirrels climb the tree and steal away with others. All the while, crawling insects with oval red backs painstakingly bore into the shell, whether the nut has fallen or not.

I occupied this little plot of earth for nearly three years before realizing I shared it with a macadamia nut tree, a figurative tree of life.

How many of us stumble around on this rock, not noticing the fruit all around us?

How much have I missed while shuffling around inside this coil? About a year ago, an arborist named Joseph came to help manage our trees. He showed me how to trim dead limbs without injuring the trees. Then he took a walk around the grounds, to inspect our other trees.

"You have a carob tree 'round back."

Huh. We thought that it was an oak tree that kept dropping those pods. And I always thought carob was that fake chocolate that they put in the trail mix.

Carob is also known as St. John's Bread. Carob was eaten by ancient Egyptians, and the pod is used in the Egyptian hieroglyph to signify "sweet," or nedjem.

Carob is sometimes called St. John's Bread because it is thought that the "locusts" that John the Baptist ate in the wilderness may have been carob.

The Greek word for carob seed, kerátion, is the indirect root for the word "carat," which we use today to measure gemstone mass and gold purity.

Forty years ago, or so, a thoughtful man planted a little tree there, and it bears fruit, even as generations pass one to another.

Obama's Declaration Of War

President Obama was in Singapore six weeks ago, and made comments about the upcoming election. I don't have a problem with a sitting President campaigning for their guy. But everyone should be concerned about the President's rhetoric.

"There have been Republican Presidents with whom I disagreed with, but I didn’t have a doubt that they could function as President. Mitt Romney and John McCain were wrong on certain policy issues, but I never thought that they couldn’t do the job.

"Had they won, I would have been disappointed, but I would have said to all Americans they are -- this is our President.

"I know they’re going to abide by certain norms and rules and common sense, will observe basic decency, will have enough knowledge about economic policy and foreign policy and our constitutional traditions and rule of law.

"But that’s not the situation here. And that’s not just my opinion; that is the opinion of many prominent Republicans."

The only good Republican is a former Republican. And how did he manage to keep a straight face and utter the phrase "rule of law?"

Anyway, what is he saying here? He is implying that if Donald Trump wins, he will consider Trump illegitimate.

And Barack Obama knows what it feels like to be illegitimate. His father was already married when little Barack was born, which makes little Barack a little bastard.

Obama doesn't seem to be tiring of questioning Trump's fitness for office. From a different lectern in a different foreign country, Laos, Obama said,

"I don't think the guy's qualified to be president of the United States."

Any lazy bastard can do the job of President. Obama proved that.

Feel Hillary's Pain

The big difference between Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton? Bill feels your pain, while Hillary wants you to feel hers.

Hillary really wants you to know just how hard it has been to be a woman competing against men. So she constantly makes up ridiculous stories.

Hillary wants you to understand that her childhood dream of becoming an astronaut was exploded on the launch pad because NASA wasn't taking women.

"I wrote a letter to the NASA space agency and asked how I could become an astronaut. And I got a letter back saying that they weren’t accepting women. Now, I have to be very honest with you. I could never have qualified." Notice that she said she has to be "very honest" after she dispenses her fable.

Hillary also wants you to know that she wanted to become a Marine, but the recruiter turned her away. There are two versions of this myth, which proves the adage that it's easier to get away with lying if you get your stories straight.

Hillary told the recruiter that she was then 27, and he replied, "Well, that is kind of old for us. Maybe the dogs will take you."

The other version, the one she tells to draw sympathy from easily-manipulated women, is that the recruiter told her, "You're too old, you can't see and you're a woman."

Every woman who burns with resentment at the thought of putting dirty clothes into a washing machine will relate. And now Hillary has a brand-new yarn. In her senior year at Wellesley, she sat for the law school admissions test.

"My friend and I were some of the only women in the room," she writes, when "a group of men began to yell things like: 'You don’t need to be here.' And 'There’s plenty else you can do.' It turned into a real 'pile on.' One of them even said: 'If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I'll die.'"

I don't believe for one second that all this happened in the exam room. Some of these conversations may actually have happened, and Hillary is framing this as a composite for us. It's quite likely that there were young men in her study group that expressed feelings like this.

After all, this was 1968, the height of the Vietnam War, when 16,899 young American men and innumerable other human beings perished. Does Hillary show any empathy for her classmates who might be drafted and shipped overseas? Not even a little.

That's what gets me about this story. It's quite possible that some of Hillary's classmates went off to war. Tens of thousands of young men her age never came home, but what's important to remember is that Hillary "had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions."

Poor baby.

Women Are Caring Nurturers

I was introduced to the writing of Suzanne Moore today, courtesy of an article by Paul Elam.

To call Moore a feminist is a bit of an understatement. Moore is an embittered, haggard blight on humanity. Her tweet on the subject is a little bit of a feint.

Fun!! Suzanne Moore: Why I was wrong about men https://t.co/8G9sBr3ZRU

— suzanne moore (@suzanne_moore) September 5, 2016

The reader sees that a feminist a) admits being wrong, and b) may have got the whole men thing wrong. Perhaps she's coming around on this whole men thing! Er, no.

She does get credit for openly saying what most feminists wish they could say, that, "I think that any intelligent woman hates men."

Her column begins with a flippant comment that would end a man's career if he said it about women. "Men. You can’t live with them. You can’t shoot them. Well, you can, but this is the New Statesman." This type of homicidal ideation is known as the primary process.

Most people restrain themselves from expressing fantasies like this, because they know that it is coming from a childish, irrational place. This suggests that she may be developmentally stuck in childhood, when her parents split up.

Moore's malice extends to all men ("#YesAllMen") and even boys, "who were abused at public school."

She asks herself rhetorically, "You can’t hate them individually, can you?" Her answer is "You know what? I can." Moore denies any feelings of personal bitterness, claiming this is merely "class hatred. As a class," she writes, "I hate men."

Try to imagine this type of hatred directed at any protected class. Would it be permissible to express the desire to "want to see this class broken," if the class were single mothers, or homosexual adoptive parents, or black people? Of course not.

But the world that men built tolerates such foolishness. The men that laid the pipe that carries away her shit every morning toil on with little regard to the contempt they are held in. The boys that went into the breech over the centuries now lay at rest as women like Moore tear down the institutions they died to uphold.

Hell hath no fury.

Neo-Pagan Studies

The university of the very near future will be mostly menschen-rein. The quickest path to the upper echelons of the hierarchy will be through social studies departments. If the school has any technical or engineering reputation, its defining metric will be the ratio of female to male students.

From a traditionalist point of view, Women's Studies is really neo-paganism. There is no deity save Gaia. The true path towards grace is through the Holy Vagina.

Gina Escandon is is a senior at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Cal Poly is short for California Polytechnic. She's studying "English and Theatre." She's also the editor-in-chief of her campus' chapter of Her Campus. The top story there is about Brock Turner.

It's her campus, that's for sure.

Escandon wrote an article for XO Jane about how her wedding traditions are sexist. She writes, "[my] wedding fantasies are now riddled with patriarchal symbols."

"I recently took a Women's & Gender Studies course." Let me stop right here. Why even finish the article? Her mind and soul have been infected by a virus, and she will be forever soul-sick.

She complains that the wedding ring is symbolic of "ownership." For someone with a confessed "wedding obsession," she seems unaware that the bride and groom both wear rings.

The true symbolism of the wedding ring is that of infinity. A ring is a circle with no beginning and no end. That must be confusing to someone like her who has become conditioned to think of marriage as make-work until she can take custody of the kids and her ex-husband's earnings.

She also complains that the white wedding dress symbolizes her "nonexistent virginity." That is certainly one way to look at it. But nobody really questions whether the bride is a virgin or not anymore. It is more a symbol of her soul, the purity of her soul.

A white gown is a traditional Christening gown, and the white wedding gown borrows from the Christian tradition. There are certainly cultures that value virginity more than the West, and very few of them wear white.

If any man becomes serious about joining a union with Gina Escandon, let her rejection of the eternity of the soul be his guide.

Imperator Vaginata

A prime feminist imperative is that all social studies must show women as virtuous and men as contemptible. Case in point, Danielle Paquette's Washington Post Wonkblog essay, Your manliness could be hurting the planet.

According to James Wilkie, a business professor at the University of Notre Dame, there is a "stereotype that green consumers are feminine." Furthermore, men "oppose green behaviors in order to safeguard their gender identity."

It's pretty clear that Wilkie and his team first "developed a theory," then, "conducted a set of experiments." These experiments are available online at the Journal of Consumer Research, but only if you fork over $39.00.

The studies may or may not be flawed, but the world view of Wilkie certainly is. "Male traits tend to conflict with this idea of maintaining a nice environment for other people." You mean the male trait of being protective doesn't extend to "maintaining a nice environment?"

Is buying a hybrid car a "green behavior?" Because men purchase more Prius hybrids than women. This is probably because men are better at math, and can figure out complex cost-benefit calculations like whether the cost of a Prius is justified by gas price expectations.

What other green behaviors are men avoiding in order to "safeguard their gender identity?" How about buying organic? What man spends ten dollars more on produce to procure some imaginary benefit? Is this another case of men just being better at math?

Or is it the case that women are much more likely to be swayed by emotional messaging than men? A woman will feel virtuous buying organic kale for a dollar more. Never mind that organic farms are not scalable to meet the calorie demands of a hungry world. And never mind that almost nobody ever dies from pesticide poisoning. Most people with stable emotional psyches understand that you can just wash the peach.

A really good question to ask both men and women, therefore, is what tradeoffs do you find acceptable in green products? Eighty percent of consumers think eco-friendly costs more. And anybody who has washed dishes or clothes and has tried a phosphate-free detergent can tell you, they suck.