John Leo says “Diversity is a restless quasi-religion whose missionaries are ever on the move.” Now why, I have to ask, must a movement designed to get rid of something rather than to create more of something, be restless and ever on the move?

Yale already has an impressively vast diversity bureaucracy headed by Nydia Gonzalez, the new chief diversity officer. She is working on a long-term plan, “Diversity Yale 2010 and Beyond.” Each school has its own system of diversity apparatchiks. There’s even a Yale library diversity council with 10 to 16 members and a three-year diversity program. Now Yale’s Coalition for Campus Unity (CCU) is encouraging the residential colleges to create “some kind of diversity-awareness position or board.” A board of, say, ten members in each college would add 120 new officials – another diversity gusher. Last February, Yale continued its long-term program to segment the student body into ever smaller ethnic and sexual groups. It hired a new assistant dean for Native American affairs. Can anyone say that a provost for the transgendered is somehow out of the question?

Why does Yale, or any university, need to keep creating more diversicrats? Undergraduate Robert Sanchez says his group, CCU, “thought most Yale students lacked sufficient cultural awareness,” i.e. a high enough degree of enthusiasm for the diversity movement. Sanchez, according to the Yale Daily News, seems distressed that “when we have these forums and panels we are preaching to the choir because only a certain demographic of students attend the event.”

“Diversity” has an ugly truth to it. It is the one pursuit that, on an intellectual level, is devastated completely — not just intellectually embarrassed, but intellectually devastated — by a simple rhetorical exercise. You supervise a team of ten minorities. Two of them quit. You replace them with two six-foot-tall, right handed, straight white guys. What did you do to the diversity of your team?

The mathematician, or anybody else who works in a formal discipline that has a utilitarian requirement for the d-word…not a political requirement, but a utilitarian one…would have no choice but to answer “you just increased it.” But of course that isn’t the correct answer.

Now, perhaps it’s overstating things to say “diversity” is what we call it when we deal career and economic injury and destruction to straight white guys. Or perhaps that could be called an over-simplification. But the awkward truth of things is that diversity is not race- or gender-neutral. It is a code word to promote the population of, and success of, certain groups of people. Toward other groups of people, it is hostile at worst…apathetic at the very best.

Perhaps the most pernicious canard about the d-word, is that it is costless — a canard left unspoken, although people in positions of great authority are implicitly required to behave as if they think it’s true. The truth is, the d-word cannot be costless. When you are young, you don’t have the opportunity to develop basic aptitudes that involve independence, creativity and resourcefulness, when there are officers occupying high positions for no greater purpose but to ensure that the success of your group against other groups is guaranteed. And enforced. And measured. And…that next year and the year after, there will be more officers working toward exactly that.

Needless to say, your opportunities are similarly denied when you’re a member of the group targeted. It hurts everyone. The thing we’re supposed to be calling “diversity,” on the other hand, really is harmless or ought to be harmless. It’s just this other thing, this quite different thing, to which we’ve started to affix this word. The simple fact that this thing is on a never-ending mission to expand itself, is a red flag the size of a city block all by itself.

The radio guys were just talking about Joe Horn’s case, our latest “Castle Doctrine” event.

Link, link, link, link.

Turns out there’s a racial angle to this. The burglars gunned down by Horn, had skin darker than his. Which gives us a lot of stuff about which to think…

Critics of the way the case has been handled say the 911 tape is proof that Horn was predetermined to shoot the men before stepping outside with his gun.

Noting that Horn is white and the suspects were dark-skinned, Quanell X, a Houston activist, has accused the authorities of bias. “Mr. Horn did not have to kill those people,” Quanell X said at a protest on the street where the men were shot. “Mr. Horn became judge, jury and executioner.”

This is just so unbelievably phony. What’s going on here is there are two kinds of people who want to see Horn strung up by his balls. There are the “veal calf state” people who want to get a cultural contract going in which nobody is authorized, or able, to provide for their own defense. With a little bit of diligent reading-of-news day to day, you’ll see this spans a number of issues: We’re supposed to wait helplessly for some state agency to provide our…childrens’ education, our medicine, our next pay raise, our home defense, a retirement plan for our parents — everything. The one thing that doesn’t get nearly as much inspection as it deserves: If the “veal calf state” folks get their way, and we get some gargantual plan going to make sure “everybody gets” whatever goody is being discussed, and you don’t think it’s enough for you and you want to use your own billfold to supplement it…that’s not allowed. This element always seems to be present in all these plans; either already here, or coming soon. I think most rational, middle-of-the-road people, open to the plan but not yet having made up their minds, would deem that worthy of prolonged discussion. But most of the folks who are in business to dish out the stuff we call “news,” tend to gloss right over it.

I can see a good argument for the “thou shalt not supplement with thine own” doctrine in home defense. I don’t sympathize with it, but I can at least see it. I can’t see it with medicine. Or education. But that doctrine is always there. This, it seems to me, ought to make people generally more suspicious than they usually are.

The other group of people who want to see Joe Horn flushed down the tubes, of course, would be the reverse-racists. You know the type. The ones who say it’s not possible to even be a racist, unless you are a caucasian. Nobody will ever admit that burglary is a way of evening up some kind of racial score, of course…but these types will never fail to act that way, when it comes time to discuss what should happen to Mr. Horn.

But here’s what I think is really interesting. In the case of Mr. Horn, these two camps of people are united. Easily and effortlessly. Seamlessly. Obviously, if they were to be divided instead of united, the thing that would bring that about would be — some white guy broke into a black guy’s house, and the black guy pulled out a shotgun and ventilated him. Or…pulled out a crowbar. Or a knife. Used some implement to enforce the Castle Doctrine.

Does this never happen in a country with three hundred million people in it? I find that to be unfathomable. For one thing, a public agency capable of responding to personal emergencies, effectively, reliably, much as a staple as that ought to be, is something more easily acquired by the affluent. And I continue to be told our minorities are generally subjugated to the lower economic strata. This is, I’ve been informed, what led to the Katrina disaster in New Orleans…”George Bush doesn’t care about black people” and all that.

Now, I know exactly where I stand on Joe Horn. I think it’s very important to everybody else, that this guy walk — and if he was black, I’d be saying exactly the same thing. Quanell X, and the people who like to carry Quanell X’s ravings to the airwaves and newspaper pages, may see this as a racial issue; I do not. Nor am I the only one disagreeing with that. Nearly everybody who agrees with me on his situation as it exists now, I daresay, would follow me in staying consistent on the issue if the skin colors were reversed. My viewpoint is simply a desire to return to the old social contract: If you kick in someone’s door to take his stuff, nobody can say what’s about to happen to you and nobody should be able to say what will happen to you, because it’s something you aren’t supposed to do. In other words, in our desire to make things safe, and working with the limited resources to make everything safe, we prioritize appropriately by making life safer for the law-abiding. Black, white, green, purple, paisly I don’t care.

But that other side…the side that favors either reverse-discrimination, to even up “historic wrongs,” or continued propagation of the “veal calf state”…would be deeply split if a story came to light about a white redneck going to the Jailhouse in the Sky when breaking into the house of someone with darker skin. That side would be split. My side would stay unified.

So where’s the story? How come every one of these vigilante episodes that make the news, is a remake of the Bernhard Goetz incident?

To dismiss this casually, you’d have to insist dark-skinned people are committing all the burglaries, and that white people have all the guns. I think we can dismiss those outright. Therefore, this means something.

See, this is strong evidence that our news is being filtered. But it’s also strong evidence of something else: The unity of that other side…this sloppy conglomeration of “payback against white people” activists, and “get rid of every smallest tincture of independence and self-sufficiency” activists…is not being challenged because someone has calculated it would not be able to survive such a challenge. The fissure would be split clean through, and the split would be fatal or near-fatal.

I guess if I’m less cynical, I’m to suppose everyone in journalism wants to win a Pulitzer over the next story that busts the racial divide wide open. And that would explain why, if Joe Horn had darker skin than the two burglars he neutralized, we would not have heard about this. Our reporters are keeping their eyes and ears open for the next Bernhard Goetz or Rodney King incident and they think this might be it.

But if I’m to allow for that, I’m to allow for something else as well. Perhaps there’s something in journalism that makes professionals in that business, sympathize with the veal-calf-state people. It’s always made sense to me that citizens of a veal-calf-state, need the stuff we call “news” a lot more than citizens who take care of themselves. People who are invested in their careers, common sense says, will sacrifice anything to keep those careers going. This theory isn’t so paranoid — it simply says journalists are no different than any other professional. They’ll become activists for whatever political movement will make their commodity more economically viable, and in greater demand from the rest of us.

The racial angle, it seems to me, is simply a powerful engine affixed to this primary agenda, to give it propulsion. It’s really about demolishing the Castle Doctrine. I struggle to remember the last time I heard of a news reporter or editor passing up a chance to show hostility to this doctrine, or any other doctrine that makes people self-sufficient, self-responsible and independent. They just don’t want it. They want a society in which people depend on something external to themselves…because that makes people hungry for this stuff we call “news.”

And so this incident that really has nothing to do with race at all — positions a microphone in front of the mouth of this Quanell character so that we can read a bunch of reverse-racist drivel. Once again, in a world wherein information travels quickly, racial disharmony is to ensue where, if information did not travel so quickly, it would not. A simple situation is about to be made glaringly complicated.

But it isn’t complicated. At all. You don’t want to get shot, don’t take people’s stuff.

Update: I find it to be patently absurd, but sadly somewhat unsurprising, that the Los Angeles Times, or whoever fed this to them, would run a story so casually inserting a quote form Quanell X without delving at least a little bit into his history. How in the world could the quote have been newsworthy and the background not?

Someone was wondering about the 200+ things I know, and asking if there was any theme that permeates through all of them, or most of them. I would say if there is a core theme, it’s got to do with the way people tend to work. If they themselves operate according to what is widely accepted of them, and they see someone else “coloring outside the lines,” if you will — they’ll use up an excessive amount of energy reigning the maverick in. They’ll do this without any cost-benefit analysis of any kind. Without understanding the point of the rules they’re practically enforcing, or satisfying themselves that anybody else understands the point.

And if we can’t bring people into line with rules we don’t understand, we will ostracize those people.

There is a name for this. It is called TTWWADI.

In short, we are wired to live in villages. It is in our genetic programming. We’re pre-disposed to live in villages with rules we may or may not understand, and to banish people in those villages if they don’t conform to the rules we don’t understand. But what I’m calling out, goes a little bit further than simple TTWWADI; there are other tragic habits we have, too. When we meet strangers, we are programmed to reach a series of inferences that have to do with whether the strangers live in our tribe, or could be accepted into our tribe.

This is in conflict, generally, with what our parents taught us about strangers. Most of us were brought up by our parents to treat all strangers as — well, you know, strangers. You’re supposed to look at him as someone who could be a good guy, might be a bad guy, in all likelihood is okay, but don’t trust him too much. Most of us think we’re doing it the way Mom and Dad told us to. But very few of us do that, because the genetic programming is more powerful and effervescent than the environmental. That printed-circuit in our brains compels us to reach a snap-judgment about the stranger, one which our parents never told us to try to reach.

He’s on our side, or else he’s with those other guys.

What is really unfortunate about this, is this programming inclines us to re-define truth according to that tribal compatibility. We tend to presume someone is lying or is mistaken, if we’ve already concluded they’re incompatible with our tribe — even if the subject on which they’re speaking is well outside of our understanding. If we’ve already concluded they’re part of our tribe, or could be part of our tribe, they could wax eloquently about the most bloated nonsense for hours, and we’ll believe them without question.

When people behave this way, it logically follows that the first thing they attack is whatever might lift them — might have already lifted them — out of the existence of some stoop-shouldered grub-sucking savage. They tend to punish invention and creativity. That’s what is so dangerous about blind conformity — it disguises itself as a necessary agent of life, but really it attacks life. It’s a step down. And that is the core theme to all the things I know. It is not so much an epiphany, as it is a criticism. It is a criticism of civilization’s unfortunate tendency to tear itself apart, to deprive itself of all the things that made it possible in the first place. Of civilization’s intrinsic leanings toward a sort of patricide.

So if there is a “vanguard” Thing I Know, one item that represents most of the others but speaks more clearly than any of those, it would probably be Number 130.

Some of us refuse to act this way. When we’re told we’re “supposed to” do something, we want to know why. We don’t do this so we can be seen acting smarmy; we do this because it makes sense. When we buy things that require assembly, we (within reason) throw away the instructions as part of the first step. In short, we trust our ability to think rationally. To play chess with life…if you are hip with that metaphor. We figure that ability, and the using of it, are indispensable parts of our purpose on this planet.

If someone needs help, we help. If we need help, we analyze how it is we came to need the help, and resolve to do things differently next time. If someone helps us, we reward them, make ourselves more like them, and encourage others to be more like them. We are not parasites…

…we are men. We are REAL men.

We observe, we perceive, we conclude, we question. When one-two-three instructions are readily available and easily obtained, we insist on figuring things out for ourselves. Others point at us and laugh…but they are around to do the laughing, only because of us, or people like us, or someone who did things the way we do them. We know this. Those who point and laugh know this. Everybody knows this, we just don’t talk about it out loud: Following instructions, doing things for reasons you don’t internally comprehend but someone else somewhere might — has to do with getting yourself accepted into something…and nothing else. It has butkus to do with blazing any kind of trail. It has butkus to do with helping people, or building anything. It has butkus to do with finding something, and leaving it in better shape than the way you found it. To do any of those things, you’ve got to turn on your brain and think like a big boy.

I’d like to record two links about real men. No, they are not porn. They are long, windy epistles. They are both, insofar as I can gather, about men the way I have just defined men, above. Not nerds, not jocks. Not even male people, strictly speaking…I personally know of more than a few women who are “real men,” in the way they look at the world, and they are wonderful people — remarkably feminine when they want to be.

So you see, being a MAN is a state of mind. It is a way of living life. We owe everything — everything — to real men…and we’re engaged in a process of trying to get rid of them, a process nobody can logically explain.

The first essay is Is There Anything Good About Men?, by one Professor Roy F. Baumeister. We learn about it from blogger friend James at News Blog Central. And the other, which we find via our other blogger friend Misha at Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, is The Pussification of the Western Male by one Kim du Toit.

My advice is to make time…read them…both. And when you’re done, take a long, hard look at the bandwagon-people, the folks with such strong opinions about how other people should do things, just because that’s the way things should be done. People who try to cudgel you into agreeing with them, not by arguing their positions logically, but by citing polls that say how lonely you will be otherwise. People who don’t know what it’s like to go against the crowd, have never known this, and don’t want anyone else to know what that’s like either.

And then look at the “fem-bigots,” the people who — whether they realize it or not — harbor some pissy, juvenile desire to get rid of all real men. People who insist on advancing safety at the expense of opportunity, and furthermore, insist that everyone everywhere do exactly that. People who are never fully satisfied in their mission to make everyone around them think this way…and look at the world this way. People who will push and push and push for this, until we’re all just plodding through life, solely for the purpose of hanging around a little while longer, and for no higher reason than just that. People with seemingly-infinite inventories of mens’ liabilities, and would respond only with paralysis and a sneer if asked what might be good about men. What Prof. Baumeister referred to as “gender warriors” when he wrote, “gender warriors please go home,” or half of his intended reference, anyway. The “man-bashers.”

You’ll see something interesting about these two groups of people: They’re the same people. Not always…but almost always. You’ve got to work at it for awhile before you find someone who qualifies for one of these descriptions, and not the other. Conclusion: Whether the authors of the essays realize it or not, and whether their man-bashing critics realize it or not — this is not about homo sapiens who have reached maturity and are equipped with penises and testicles. It is about persons, of both genders, who think independently. Real men, and women who think like real men. I expect things have always been this way and always will be this way. The non-real-man people — people who want to do all their thinking through the “tribal council” — will want everybody else to do their deep thinking through proxy as well, because that’s what they’re doing.

Real men, it turns out, are just as scary as they’ve been popularly believed to be. But it isn’t the muscular body of a real man that is scary, or his need for deoderant, or his hairy chest…it is his mind. People who don’t use their brains, are terrified of people who do.

That is…children of divorced parents use Ritalin twice as much as children of non-divorced parents. What could this possibly mean?

Perhaps the disabilities addressed by Ritalin are not twice as prevalent among divorced children, it’s just that divorce tends to bring the needed medical/psychiatric attention to these needs, attention which is being systematically denied to children growing up in intact homes.

Or perhaps divorce traumatizes children and tends to manufacture learning disabilities that did not exist previously.

You want my opinion?

All right…you realize, that this is The Blog That Nobody Reads — written by some guy with a high school education. No credentials in anything. Which means nobody’s gone out on a limb and stated for the record that I know anything. It also means I have nothing to lose. And the case could be made, that people with impressive credentials have become plentiful and rather cheap. Whereas people who think things out, and have nothing to lose from saying what they’ve figured out…well, at the risk of sounding immodest, I would hazard a guess that our class has become a little bit more rare and precious, “blogosphere” phenomena notwithstanding.

Here’s my take on why the study found out what it found out. Just bear in mind…I never said you were going to like it.

I have already addressed this somewhat. The study gives me cause to think about Thing I Know #179, which says…

Children seem to be “diagnosed” with lots of things lately. It has become customary for at least one of their parents to be somehow “enthusiastic” about said diagnosis, sometimes even confessing to having requested or demanded the diagnosis. Said parent is invariably female. Said child is invariably male. The lopsided gender trend is curious, and so is the spectacle of parents ordering diagnoses for their children, like pizzas or textbooks.

Let’s leave that last part out of it. Obviously, there are ethical issues involved with a parent waltzing in to a doctor’s office and intoning something to the effect of, “I would like my child to be diagnosed with xxx and I would like him to get a prescription for yyy.” It’s simply not supposed to work that way. And on the record, I’m sure it doesn’t. The same way I’m sure politicians never find jobs for their mistresses who’ve done the best job of sucking their dicks. And then reality beckons…politicians do find jobs for their fellating girlfriends, and doctors do write prescriptions based on a parent’s demand and nothing else. I think we should leave it aside, because there are other things I want to address, and I think in the decades to come that issue will work itself out.

Let’s just agree on this: Kids have a disability that calls for Ritalin, when an adult in a position of authority says they have such a disability. It’s a subjective thing. A child matures from his mother’s uterus, to the first drink his daddy buys him for his 21st birthday. This is a spectrum of responsibilities that increase over the timespan in question. Just as the fuselage of a jet aircraft becomes warmer as the speed of the craft increases, the child generates friction and frustration among the adults who have responsibility for his actions as he embraces these responsibilities.

This is all the way things are supposed to be…and the way they are.

But now, since we’re inspecting my opinion, let’s inspect the parents. Thing I Know #179 calls for us to pay some attention to gender relationships. Let’s think about girls and boys, and the way they mature.

First, a little background about your humble author. This is necessary, because we need to take a look at the reality I know, and the reality that has been dictated to me from about fourth grade onward. You know what I’ve been told because it’s the same crap you’ve probably been told. Something about, lessee…I’ll try to get this right. Men have been — YAAAAAAWWWWNNNNN — muscling women around for “five thousand years” I think is how it goes…and it’s time for some payback.

How does this square against what I know. Well, I grew up in a family of boys. Mom, Dad, Older Brother, and your humble scribe.

My mother grew up in a family of boys. Mom, Dad, the three sons who popped out boom-boom-boom, and the afterthought who was conceived when the youngest son was a teenager.

My father grew up in a family of boys. Mom, Dad, son-daughter-son-son-son.

And then there’s me. Good Lord, what a mess. I left home, had a live-in, had another live-in, had my “starter” marriage when I was way too young to even think of such a thing, got divorced, had another live-in, moved, had another live-in, resolved never to live-in again, moved again, got in a steady relationship, got dumped, dated up a storm, knocked somebody up, called out of retirement from live-in because I knocked somebody up…”wasted” a decade of my life on that I guess you could say…split up, dated up a storm again, got another steady…I’ll probably come out of retirement from living-in again soon.

Anyway, we’re talking about a lot of households here. And you know what I know about households?

There’s no five thousand year payback needed. From what I’ve seen, and what I know…even in male-heavy households, every single room, every single wall, every single square inch — what the matriarch wants there, is what is there. What the matriarch doesn’t want there, doesn’t go. PERIOD. There doesn’t seem to be any limit on how far back-in-time this goes. In fact, from the information that has come to my attention…way back, generations ago, when men were supposed to be cheering each other on while we gave our wives black eyes and knocked their teeth out…the record seems to indicate something else. The record seems to indicate, Grandpa got home, put his shoes exactly where Grandma told him to put them, hung his coat where Grandma told him to hang it, and pretty much reconciled with whatever decorative scheme she had going on under that roof, until it was time to leave for work the following morning.

To the best of my knowledge, we’ve really been sold a bill of goods. I’m told men made all the decisions, but I haven’t gotten ahold of any solid information to help substantiate that. Speaking for myself, the best information I have is that men made all the decisions after they were dressed and out the door, and up until they crossed that threshold again at twilight. Just that 33% of the day. No more than that.

Women run the household. They rule the remaining sixteen hours. And here’s something else: How long has this been going on? Well, to the best I can see…not just for a mere chunk of the five millenia us guys are supposed to have been knocking their teeth out…but for all of that eon. Back to biblical times. Further than that, even.

Now, let us inspect childhood. Some children are boys; some children are girls. When you’re a child, although perhaps you lack the perspective to fully appreciate it, you’ve got a lot of free time on your hands. There is time to “play”; more than there ever will be from cradle to grave. How do we spend this playtime? If you’re a boy — you spend it playing with other kids, or else you spend it “geeking out.” In my day, you played with blocks, and then Lincoln Logs, and then Toggles and Leggos and Erector sets. And then you went out and played with other kids. You played tag. You threw dirt clods and pine cones at each other. In the summer, you rode bikes together. Or you went out to that really, really high bridge and then you engaged in the activity that defines what a man is: You picked out a target, and tried to spit on it from 150 feet up. In winter, you climbed on sleds and raced them down hills. Oh, and you’d better believe somebody built a ramp; and airborne you went, slave to inertia, master of the skies. Wheeee!

What do all of these activities have in common? Simple: SHIT HAPPENS. The result you desire is defined, and simple. Reality will deliver on it…or it won’t. This is what excites the masculine psyche. I would assert that all things “real men” like, in childhood and beyond, have this in common: A documented, precision-defined desire, and an event which carries the fulfillment of that desire, out of the subjective realm, and into the objective one. Your gamble paid off, or else it didn’t. This is what gives a man a good time.

What do our girls do?

They play with dolls.

How do you play with dolls?

You figure out what you want each doll to do, and then you move them through those motions. You figure out what you want each doll to say, and then you speak for the doll, and imagine the doll saying that thing.

Now, let’s cut the crap. Our children spend copious amounts of time in the manner I’ve just described; the boys cope with reality as a form of sport, and the girls make their own reality. They spend all their leisure time in some form or another of this, and lordy lordy, nobody’s got more leisure time than a child. They do this for all of their childhoods, until they mature into adults. Boys accept reality; girls manufacture reality.

And then after they reach maturity, we indulge in this pretend-game that men and women are exactly the same. If you deviate from this by one little smidgen, acknowledging so much as a scintilla of aptitudinal difference between male & female, you are excoriated. If you possess any authority over anybody at all, you lose it and your career comes to an abrupt and humiliating end.

And yet…in spite of our cultural taboos…reality beckons.

Men and women reach maturity with differences in their individual readiness to accept reality, with all the surprises and discomforts it offers. The difference is there. Good heavens, how in the world could it not be? Sure, here and there a girl will join her male friends in spitting at leaves off a high bridge, or throwing dirt clods at each other. But that isn’t a “real” girl of course; that is a “tomboy.” That’s the way it worked with I was a small child, and I’m an old man with a head full of gray hair. It works that way right now, in the moment wherein I type this very sentence. And it worked that way when my grandmother was just an itch in her daddy’s britches. “Nice” girls play with girly things. And girly things are figurines that represent people and animals who are “supposed” to do certain things and say certain things.

Which means: Our women are experts at demanding we all behave certain ways. When humans behave in strange and unorthodox ways…well, how do I put this diplomatically. I don’t. There’s a huge gender barrier among those of us who are prepared for strange and unorthodox behavior, and those of us who are not. Men reach maturity seeing people as strangers, who might or might not do anything, at any time. Women, on the other hand, reach maturity seeing people as participants in a play, who are “supposeda” do certain things at certain times, who are “supposeda” say certain things at certain times.

And here’s another piece of reality we need to acknowledge, that seldom is. Ritalin is prescribed because “something must be done.” That phrase keeps popping up. And “something must be done” because the caregiver — the parent, or teacher, or whatever — suffers from an inability to give the child the attention “he demands.”

That’s why the use of the remedy increases after divorce. It doesn’t have to do with the needs of the child. It has to do with the resources, in terms of time & attention, the mother has to give the son. Divorce, whether you are a man or a woman, is not fun by a damn sight. It saps all of your “bandwidth”; your time, your money, your energy, your creativity, your whole reason for being.

Ritalin use doubles after divorce? I’m surprised it doesn’t triple. Women, more often than not, end up with custody. Women want things to be the way they want them to be; they were brought up that way, playing with dolls when they were girls. They’re simply not ready to accept whatever exigencies reality has to offer. Not on par with their male counterparts, who grew up being forced off the bike trail by more aggressive bicyclists, or losing the Pinewood Derby, or seeing their spitwads miss the floating leaf by a good fifteen feet, or buried headfirst down to their shoulders in a snowbank after their sled made a wrong turn.

Women want things to be the way they want things to be. It’s in their nature. Their genetic code. The way they were brought up.

And as our society becomes more pasteurized and “progressive” — our moms have some real problems relating to their sons.

Who’s going to solve this for us? Well, don’t look to our mental health professionals. The profits involved in Ritalin are said to be very steep — nobody’s offered any evidence that would contradict this — and anyone who is somehow insulated and disconnected from those profits, probably doesn’t have much to say about how a boy will be brought up by his divorced mother.

So Ritalin use will continue to go up. It will become a guaranteed thing, in any scenario wherein a maturing boy demands attention beyond what his mother is ready, willing, or able to give. She demands a level of conformity that at his stage in life, he cannot supply. So back up the truck to the loading dock — we need Ritalin!

That’s my take on it. But what do I know. I’m not a doctor. I don’t have a degree, or even a college education. I’m just a doofus. But I’m a dude…and a Dad.

And so far…after a lifetime, childhood-included, of objectively ascertaining reality and responding logically to it…I’ve yet to see reality deliver some facts to pose any problems for my explanation, or even to upset it a little.

But like I said, I’m just a rustic little peasant scribbling things down for a blog that nobody reads. So I yield to our clipboard-carrying, white-coat-wearing, all-knowing, credentialed, propeller-beanie-wearing behavioral experts, while they bring their superior academic/intellectual resources to the problem at hand, and try to address the question that has bobbled up. But until they offer a better explanation, I believe in mine, politically incorrect as it may be.