Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
…and those who insist on glamorizing it, scribbling down glossy articles to the effect that this is just things-the-way-they-are, you’d better get used to it.
Why isn’t the number of smokers treated as a fait accompli that the rest of us just have to accept? Smoking causes a lot less damage and the harm befalls the person who chooses to smoke, not innocent children.
The Times’ single motherhood endorsements always describe single mothers as the very picture of middle-class normality: “She grew up in blue-collar Chester County, Pa., outside Philadelphia, and talks like a local girl (long O’s). Her father was a World War II vet who worked for a union and took his kids to Mass most Sundays.” Even as a girl she dreamed of raising a baby with a 50 percent greater chance of growing up in poverty.
How about some articles on all the nice middle-class smokers whose fathers served in World War II and took them to Mass? Only when describing aberrant social behavior do Times writers even recognize what normality is, much less speak of it admiringly.
According to hysterical anti-smoking zealots at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, smoking costs the nation $92 billion a year in “lost productivity.” (Obviously these conclusions were produced by people who not only have never smoked, but also don’t know any smokers, who could have told them smoking makes us 10 times more productive.)
Meanwhile, single motherhood costs taxpayers about $112 billion every year, according to a 2008 study by Georgia State University economist Benjamin Scafidi.
Smoking has no causal relationship to crime, has little effect on others and — let’s be honest — looks cool. Controlling for income, education and occupation, it causes about 200,000 deaths per year, mostly of people in their 70s.
Single motherhood, by contrast, directly harms children, occurs at a rate of about 1.5 million a year and has a causal relationship to criminal behavior, substance abuse, juvenile delinquency, sexual victimization and almost every other social disorder.
Yes, it is fascinating, isn’t it…some social vices we just gotta stop come-what-may, no-matter-what. With others the message is different: Don’t You Dare Criticize.
Who makes these rules?
Money seems to me to be at the heart of it. When people act in a manner inconsistent with logic and common sense, but with a sticky stultifying consistency with regard to each other, and they don’t really care too much about what it is they’re doing but are doggedly determined to keep on doing it…that’s usually money. Doling it out, or raking it in. In this case I think it’s raking it in.
Well, I became convinced long ago that Ritalin, and other (overpriced) remedies for learning disabilities, are in fact bonding agents between young boys and their overly-controlling mothers who can’t quite figure ’em out because they don’t act enough like girls. This is an enormous, blossoming industry, and it doesn’t thrive in proximity to households with strong male figures. The diligent patriarch seems to have an antithetical relationship with consumerism in general, in fact. Once consumerism swells up past the critical horizon of irresponsibility, and nurses a desire to keep on ballooning outward, it tends to enter into an inimical relationship with manhood.
Once a lady becomes a single mother, if she has boys in the household, the Ritalin prescription is just a matter of time. Usually, she already doesn’t understand her own sons. If she does, she won’t later.
The really tricky thing about single motherhood, is that it is a mixture of women who chose to be single mothers, and other women who did not. So that could be a defense of the New York Times, I think; smokers always choose to smoke.
But it’s an indictment against them as well. Women do choose, here and there, to become single mothers. With or without a decent command of knowledge of the eventual consequences. How many of them are nose-deep in these glossy New York Times articles about how much sympathy and goodwill comes your way, once you start struggling as a single parent?
But their kids aren’t participating in the choice. They aren’t choosing to have their God-given masculinity medicated away because momma can’t figger ’em out. And the burdens they must bear for being part of such a decision, they must bear over an entire lifetime.
Which justifies Coulter’s trademark closing-uppercut, in my mind:
If the establishment media wrote about smoking the way they write about unwed motherhood, I think people would notice that they seem oddly hellbent on destroying as many lives as possible.
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