Good Riddance to the "Home Cooked" Meal

From a couple of years ago is this article by a dude who laments the decline of home cooking.  He thinks we should mourn it because cooking at home is allegedly cheaper and "healthier."  Neither is true.

When you figure in the time and labor in preparation and cleanup, not to mention the time and money it takes to buy the ingredients, it is NOT cheaper and it is a time suck.  It isn't "healthier."  There is no evidence of that whatsoever.  People are living longer anyway, and it has nothing to do with whether mommy is cooking meals at home from scratch, for crying out loud.  And face it:  It IS always the woman who is expected to perform this time sucking bullshit day in day out, in times of yore three times a day, for decades.

Though the author denies he is shaming women for rejecting the bullshit "homemaking" role whether out of choice or necessity, he is doing exactly that.  Men as a rule do not do it if women are anywhere around.  It's changing, to be true, but cooking is still seen as a sex-typed chore.  And it is a CHORE, a giant pain in the ass.

I have written about this topic before.  I was way, way, way ahead of my time rejecting this housewife bullshit.  My mother and two sisters (the latter way older than I am) performed this nonsense because it was expected of them.  It was a way different era.  I was a little girl then, and I wanted no part of it.  I always thought it was an inferior endeavor, as I noticed men never would lower themselves to doing it.

Good riddance to the expectation of a home-cooked meal along with the family eating together.

If Marriage Goes, Goodbye and Good Riddance

Contrary to propaganda, marriage hasn't always existed, and societies did just fine without it.  It came into existence around 5,000 years ago for a specific reason, and that is it was considered a property transfer arrangement between fathers and husbands.  Women were part of the property to be exchanged, and any children resulting from the marriage became the property of the man.  Marriage seems to have come into existence around the time people realized there was such a thing as paternity, and of course the creation of the concept of property furthered the necessity of a man making sure "his" offspring were really "his."  Women weren't considered human beings, just vessels to be fucked and have children.

Religion had little to do with the creation of marriage.  It always was a legal or quasi-legal arrangement to guarantee men's paternity rights.  All the metaphors about marriage being representative of Christ and the church (in Christianity) are just that--metaphors.   They have nothing to do with why it ever existed in the first place.  Societies continued without it for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years prior to its existence.

However, marriage has had its day, and marriage rates (plus birthrates) have declined over the decades.  The baby boomers, especially the second half of the cohort, started paving the way for the decline in the institution.  I say the second half because the first half was still like previous generations (especially the two prior generations who came of age during WW II and the fifties) and did the early marriage bullshit that seems so damned repulsive in retrospect but was still rampant throughout the sixties and early seventies.  The median age of first marriage for women (half before, half after), hovered around 20-21 years of age (men around 22-23) until 1980, when it hit 22 for the first time in years, if ever.  Women who were getting married, if they were, and the vast majority of the baby boom generation did at least once, were starting to do it later.  More and more women were working in jobs, whether married or not, and this meant they were less inclined to get married and have children or have fewer children.  This has continued to this very day, with the millennials being less inclined to do the marriage and babies lifestyle than even the baby boomers, and generations X and Y.

One could argue that marriage started falling out of fashion even before the baby boomers were born, and that is likely true, as women started getting more and more rights and gaining access to more occupations, starting in the late 19th century.  One could argue, and I do, that the postwar mania for early marriage and lots of kids was an aberration, an aberration fostered by the kicking out of millions of women from factory and other "male" jobs they held during  World War II in order to make way for the returning servicemen, plus tax incentives and the G.I. Bill.  However, things did change, especially with the economy and the decline of the "family wage," which began in the mid-1970s.  Economy or not, though, women were not going back once they got a taste of the world outside the confines of the home.

As an aside, I received in the mail the other day a copy of a book I obtained on Amazon of an old, old, old book I read years ago by the psychologist Lawrence Casler, who I don't know if he is still alive (he was early in the 21st century).  This book is titled, Is Marriage Necessary?  It was published in 1974, when I was a mere 19 years old, but it was a favorite of mine for many years.  Despite the afterward by the horrible pervert Albert Ellis--believe me, this was NOT a selling point in favor of this book--Casler's tome was way, way, way ahead of its time.  As I remember, he sympathized with feminists who said that abolishing marriage was necessary for the liberation of women, but he wasn't in favor of it "at this time" as he thought a more gradual decline in marriage with alternative arrangements was more likely to have public acceptance.  He was right, and marriage rates have declined over the decades since, with more and more people cohabiting before or instead of marriage or not bothering with doing either at all.   This despite same-sex marriage having been legalized, of which there was admittedly a big boom in, but gay/lesbians are a small segment of the population.  Overall, the die has been cast.   Now we are at the point in 2019 where married people over 18 make up only half the adult population whereas 60 years ago, in 1960, 72 percent of adults were married.  This is a huge change that will not, in my view, reverse itself ever again despite attempts by the right to return to the 1950s and ban abortion.  It is not going to happen at all.

There was a time years ago, when there was something called "developmental tasks," I believe based on Erik Erikson's ideas, that were largely shaped by the postwar early marriage/lots of babies era in which he lived.  Marriage and having kids were seen as important "developmental tasks" that ALL adults had to do in order to be seen as truly "adult."  Of course, being an adult is a chronological reality, not something as a result of doing certain tasks society peddles on them to try and con them to do.  Lots of people STILL believe the nonsense that marriage and parenthood confer "adulthood" despite the human wreckage such beliefs often cause.  Single people, especially women, were regarded as failures and subhumans, and they still are to a great degree by many, most often acute in religious communities.  Most people these days are not following these "developmental tasks," at least not under certain time frames, but the propaganda is still there peddled by the likes of Jordan Peterson and James Dobson.

There is really little good about marriage despite the tons upon tons of sentimentality about it, and there is definitely nothing in it for women apart from the much-higher standard of living, a standard of living that requires women put out sexually to men  in order to get it in the case of heterosexual marriage.

Snip from the article linked:

Of course, some would argue that, regardless of divorce statistics, marriage is a stabilizing force for relationships, that the commitment itself helps couples stay together when they otherwise might not. It’s true that marriages are less likely to end in breakup than are cohabiting relationships, but that might simply be because married people are a self-selected group whose relationships were already more committed. Many people anecdotally report that getting married deepens their sense of commitment, even when they didn’t expect it to.

But other studies have shown that it’s the level of commitment that matters to relationship satisfaction or the age at which the commitment is made—not a couple’s marital status. A further problem is that social norms surrounding marriage, divorce, and cohabitation have changed rapidly in the past few decades, so getting a reliable longitudinal data set is hard. And though divorce is certainly difficult, it’s not as though cohabiting unmarried couples can just walk away: Mark and I own property together and may someday have kids; beyond our own sense of commitment, we have a lot of incentives to stay together, and disentangling our lives would be hard, even without divorce.

The psychologist Bella DePaulo, who has spent her career studying single people, says she believes there are serious repercussions of putting marriage at the center of one’s life. “When the prevailing unquestioned narrative maintains that there is only one way to live a good and happy life, too many people end up miserable,” she says. The stigma attached to divorce or single life can make it difficult to end an unhealthy marriage or choose not to marry at all. DePaulo thinks people are hungry for a different story. She argues that an emphasis on marriage means people often overlook other meaningful relationships: deep friendships, roommates, chosen families, and wider networks of kin. These relationships are often important sources of intimacy and support.

link

In other words, marriage and the nuclear family tend to cut people off from other relationships and from society as a whole, which is a great argument against it. I can't disagree with it.

It is just that the downward trend of marriage has been in the works for decades, and, in my view, in a 100 years or so, it will be seen what the late feminist writer Eva Figes wrote nearly fifty years ago in Patriarchal Attitudes as the "hollow sham" that it is.

In my own life, the only way I would ever marry would be only for the benefits like taxes, pensions, and Social Security, and only if I didn't live with the man at all.  That is the only way it would work for me.

The Truth About "Homemaking"

This was in response to a Quora question:

Let’s quit kidding ourselves about “homemaking.” It is NOT a job of any sort. It is not a real job because you do not get paid a wage in doing it. Since virtually all “homemakers”—I hate that word—are wives, they have to be dependent on a man in order to survive. He is not her “employer.” He is not having to pay anything to a wife that employers pay to their employees. A woman does not get unemployment if she is out of her “job” in the home. Her “skills” in the home are not valued by employers because what she is doing is not real work. What “benefits” she gets through her husband, including Social Security benefits, is for being a dependent and not a worker. Want further proof “homemaking” is not a job? Note that few men will lower themselves to doing it. It is drudgery. That should tell you everything about it. Women who have paying jobs are still doing the same thing as a stay-at-home wife, so are single parents. So, for the most part are single people of both sexes. Should they also be compensated for their “work” if “homemaking” is actually a “job”? Why should people who actually work subsidize what is in fact a lifestyle choice and not a “job” or a “career”?

Men give lots of lip service to “homemaking” only because that frees up more jobs for men when women leave the labor force. It also benefits men because then they don’t have to do all the drudgery in the home if they have a wife to do it and not complain.

Economists give lip service about the “value” of a “homemaker,” but it is all deceptive. It is designed to make women who opt to stay home feel good about their lifestyle choice. However, it doesn’t change the character of the endeavor. Women aren’t getting paid for this because chores around the house, including rearing kids, is not real work and is done also by those who have paying jobs.

Because it is a lifestyle choice, there is nothing wrong with it if you want to do it. Just don’t kid yourself that what you are doing is any kind of real work.



It always sticks in my craw when politicians go around and talk about how "caregivers" should get even more benefits from those of us who have to work for a living. It is just another subsidy for the well-to-do.

Denigrating "Women's Work" Is a Scourge On Humanity

If you have to ask the question of why traditional women's work, both inside and outside the home, is denigrated, then you have been asleep at the switch for the past sixty or seventy years.

It's because with "pink collar" jobs it is assumed that women don't really need very high income since they are supposedly being supported by men, the "real" wage earners. Traditional "women's jobs" are considered secondary occupations while "men's jobs" are considered primary occupations. That was a result of unions, and I am not knocking them, pushing for the concept of the "family wage" back during the postwar era. Women's financial independence was a casualty of the idea of a "family wage." It didn't help matters that feminists like the late Caroline Bird made a career out of trashing traditional women's occupations--after all, she reasoned, women should go where the men are to make decent money. That was in the days before neoliberalism took hold and all but destroyed the middle class. That mentality of working for "pin money" is why women alone can be so easily destitute--our career choices are denigrated unless women are in traditional "male" careers, many of them truly awful jobs like medicine and law (I am glad somebody does them, but they aren't all that glamorous). If we don't have that buffer of a man to support us, we are screwed, especially in old age. I don't care how how careful you save the money, if you are kicked to the curb because you are over 50 or you suffer from health problems, a lifetime of savings can go down the drain quick.

I am living proof of this mentality. I have found it nearly impossible to get back on track. Not having enough money just terrifies the shit out of me.

An Echo, Not a Choice

After years and years of being in well-deserved obscurity, wingnut extraordinaire Phyllis Schlafly, around 90 years old, is back to her old rhetoric about how if these uppity women have the nerve to make as much as men, they will find themselves unable to find husbands.

I am thinking old Fred, her late attorney husband, must not have left her all that much money when he died. She had been relatively quiet after her successful campaign to derail the Equal Rights Amendment in the early 1980s. Now she's back, but nowadays her sexist rhetoric just sounds pathetic.

Few women have ever have glittering careers like she did; in fact, the only real economic equality that has happened in this country between men and women in the past 40 years is that they are now both equally poor. That's directly due to the rise in neoliberal ideas which undercut unions and the concept of a family wage. Schlafly, of course, despises unions.

As a little girl I remember Phyllis Schlafly, a political activist from way, way back, as the woman who singlehandedly got Senator Barry Goldwater elected president in 1964 with her book, A Choice, Not an Echo.

More Cheese to Go With the Whine

Yet another "feminist" has written a book talking about the "big lies" women are being told, including the "lie" that one can put off motherhood indefinitely.

As if anybody truly gives a shit. It's just more whining from the one percent while the rest of us are falling into poverty and despair.

This article could have been written back in 1975; the "issues" are identical but increasingly irrelevant today given the massive income inequality in this country. It appears far too many self-styled feminists identify with the one-percenters in the elite, MALE-dominated fields, than with virtually all other women. I guess these people think they are better than those shitty secretaries, housewives, teachers, nurses, or any other women who dare to still work in traditional female occupations, to say nothing of those who are unemployed. Elitism has always been the Achilles' heel of the women's movement, and feminists deserve every bit of criticism for it.

The worsening living standards of the 99 percent of the people in this country is what feminists should be devoted to combating, not spending time whining about "biological clocks" and "having it all."

Smart Women, Stupid Shrinks

I've written on this blog about a billion times about how it is that when the economy goes into the ditch, there suddenly becomes all of these articles and "studies" to show how "smart," meaning those in the top one percent of income earners, are jettisoning their traditional roles because they are "selfish" and will live to regret it.

I.Q. tests don't actually measure much of anything except help shrinks in diagnosing people who may need special education services or help them get disability. Furthermore, many of these elite women have "careers" only because they are trust fund brats to begin with and have a lot more freedom to do what they want than those of us out here who had to slave and work for every goddamned dime and STILL have our security kicked out from under us by sociopaths who call themselves "bosses." Unless you are in the financial elite, you don't have a lot of control over how your life turns out.

Getting back to this idiotic study. It sounds like the person who came up with this is scared the elites aren't having enough babies to balance out the kids of the riffraff.

Of course not, but the elite of the elite have the money, thanks to manipulating the law or stealing from other people outright, to control the masses.

I Don't Need a Long Explanation

of why gender equality hasn't happened.

It's very simple why: Feminism, like all of the social movements of the sixties and seventies, was born of relatively prosperous times. Few people anticipated the rise of the traitorous and treacherous University of Chicago school of neoliberal economics, the philosophy of which undermines everything we used to hold dear in this country, most of all equality of opportunity. They have bought off our politicians, and now this country is headed to seemingly irreversible decline.

They used to round up and execute traitors, but now they have all kinds of influence despite the misery they have caused.

Now we will be lucky if we can just keep what we have instead all of us but the top one percent becoming equal slaves.

Feminists couldn't have predicted this; however, some of them still have their heads in the sand and are concerned with the problems of the one percent of households that are wealthy and concern themselves with ridiculous "issues" like job sharing and child care. To hell with the rest of us.

This piece is typical of the myopia. Who gives a shit when millions of people are on the ropes economically?

This response to her article makes me want to bang my head against the wall:

While paid maternity leave for all and improved daycare would certainly help, it is far from the only thing necessary for more equality in the workforce, or an American future that I want to be part of.

40 hour work-week enforced would help both sexes maintain a life worth living.
School hours that coincide better with work hours.
Schools that aren't begging for (female) volunteers because they don't have enough funding to teach
Career paths for people that take time off from full-time work, for any reason.
Couples that support each other in household/child care tasks.
STEM programs in every school, including single-sex STEM classes.
Policies that encourage marriage or joint parenting, rather than encouraging women to go-it-alone when their baby daddies take the easy route of abstaining from responsibility.
Less gov't bureaucracy at every level would free up time to take care of my family and serve my career. The time I've wasted figuring out taxes, 401k rules, SS rules, town permits, even parking ticket rules, is truly obscene, when my kids need help with homework, my husband with xyz and my job with deadlines. I want those hours back.

This is just a bunch of elitist shit. And by the way, teachers aren't your babysitters, so fuck that suggestion.

Etc.

For those of you curious about Pedro Martinez's record in Chicago, here is a list of pieces from Substance News, an online publication keeping track of what is going on in Chicago Public Schools.
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Did the CTU sell teachers down the river regarding the length of the school day.
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In all likelihood Mitt's IRA rollover is perfectly legal, thanks to Congress being so goddamned stupid it doesn't look at possible loopholes before passing legislation. Remember, it's a rollover, and not an annual contribution. I don't think there are any limits at all to how much can be rolled over into an IRA from another pension/401(k) source.

Remember back in the 1980s when IRAs were all the rage that people were actually taking of advantage of it? Congress realized the program was popular, so it had to put limits on the income of people who could take the full deduction from the contribution. Subsequently, IRA contributions went into a nosedive from which they never recovered.

Mitt Romney is the classic example of a tax cheat who has the good fortune (pun intended) to hire lawyers and accountants who know how to game the system for his benefit.

It should be interesting, however, if it's true he hasn't paid taxes in ten years.
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At least one person is calling this "having it all" bullshit to task.

More "Having It All" Silliness

The August issue of Harper's, which I need to subscribe to again, may be worth looking at because there is an article about Mary Kay Cosmetics, which promised women they could "have it all," but in fact is little more than a pyramid scheme enriching those at the top while the rest of the sales force struggles to make anything from it:

Ash knew from experience that traditional jobs weren’t working for women. As a divorced mother of three, she had built a career in the direct-sales industry, but she’d watched promotions go to male colleagues while she was told to “stop thinking like a woman.” So she wanted her company to be different. From the beginning, Mary Kay ladies could, in theory at least, set their hours around their children’s school days and form business connections among friends and neighbors instead of trying to crack old-boy networks.

Naturally, it didn't work for anybody except Mary Kay and a handful of top sellers. Sales is shitty work requiring people with a certain temperament to be good at it. People have to be able to persuade others that they believe in the product they are selling in order to make anything at it. They have to be able to take rejection time and time again. In other words, persistence and a gift for gab are requirements to be salespeople. Usually people not only don't "have it all" selling but wind up having nothing.

Yours truly never had that ability to b.s.

Having It Up to Here With "Having It All"

I have written time and time again about this "debate" or rather whining among elite women about how "hard" they have it in their "elite" fields making obscene salaries married to men in "elite" fields who also make obscene salaries and their lovely children who go to "elite" and almost always private schools and how they don't have enough time to "balance" "work" and "family." It is such a bunch of horseshit it makes me want to hurl.

First of all, WHO gives a shit about the "problems" of women who likely were born on third base to begin with rather than actually have worked their way up in their careers or paid their way through school? Who cares when the country is going down the toilet economically, with tens of millions of people out of work and not only don't have "it all" but don't have ANYTHING? It is the height of self-absorption and utter lack of shame to even WRITE about such a stupid topic when there are vastly more serious issues facing the country and the world.

I suppose self-absorption IS a world problem when people are focused on their own selfish interests and not on the world at large. It's a mentality typical of the top one or two percent of income "earners." They think their petty problems are everybody else's.

This writer and her ilk actually think they are better than everybody else. They arrogantly believe that because they make more money than everybody else and are in male-dominated fields they are "successful" people who are "entitled" to have "help" or "recognition" of their imagined "problems." By the way, this author could very well wind up like yours truly or many of the millions of other people who are tossed out of the labor force, especially when older, and find it almost impossible to get back in any kind of job or career, glamorous or not. She's well off now, but she isn't that well off and could very well fall into the economic pit. However, she thinks THOSE kind of situations are for OTHER people; snobs like her are worried about whether or not they have enough time to spend with their kids when they could quit their jobs and free them up for people who really DO need the work.

There was a time 35 or 40 years ago, when the economy was in much better shape before the neolibs decided to destroy it, when such issues such as child care and job sharing seemed important and achievable. Of course feminists put way too much faith in the private sector to think it would EVER do the right thing to have "family-friendly" policies. Instead, it welcomed women flooding the workplace while at the same time these businesses gutted unions and slashed men's wages and salaries to the point where two people in a household could be paid the same as one income earner. The "family wage" fought by unions for decades was dead. THAT is where the real equality ended up being, and that's with men and women being equally poor.

Those trends didn't affect elite women in elite fields like medicine and law, two of the crappiest jobs in the economy, by the way, because they don't allow much time for a personal life anyway, especially law. That is the nature of these labor-intensive jobs. Men who do them often burn out and leave a lot of ex-wives in their wake because they DON'T "have it all." If women want to waste their time in these fields, they should go for it, but they shouldn't whine about these jobs taking up so much of their time. No sympathy here, I'm afraid.

"Having it all" is just another lie like Horatio Alger. The ONLY people who truly "have it all" are those who want to OWN IT ALL in the economy. These are the people who are unscrupulous enough or were born into the right family they don't HAVE to work to have "everything."

Who CARES About Whiny Women?

The economy is in the shitter, millions are unemployed, many are homeless, there are very few jobs being created for all of those out of work, yet we are supposed to worry about tiny numbers of women in elite fields whining about how hard they have it.

Kiss my destitute ass:

The real problem here isn't about women and their options. The real problem is that technology has made it possible to work 24/7, so that the boundary between work and our personal lives has disappeared. Our cubicles are in our pockets, at the dinner table, next to our beds and even next to our children's beds as we're tucking them in. In many households, one income isn't enough, and both men and women have to work long hours -- longer hours than ever before -- to make ends meet. The women Slaughter cites as being efficient - who wake up at 4 am each day, who punch in 1:11 or 2:22 on the microwave rather than waste the millisecond to punch in 1:00 or 2:00, who put their babies in front of the computer while they type rather than savor that tiny infant in their lap - made me want to cry. How terribly sad those lives are. But to make this about women misses the point. The problem here is that many people work too much -- not just women, and not just parents.

Whether we choose to work or have to work, it's up to us to change that. I, for instance, could stay up an extra hour right now to re-read and edit this post, but it's already midnight, I'm tired, and I'd rather get to sleep. I'm sure I could be more concise and articulate, but in the scheme of life, it's not as important as my having the energy and good humor to enjoy the day with my family and friends tomorrow. Do I lack ambition? Or are my priorities the same as what Slaughter realized, in the end, were hers? It doesn't matter. I made a choice and I blame nobody -- not the Atlantic, not the patriarchy, not gender inequality, not feminism, and not even my mother's generation and its ideals -- for my sleep deprivation but me.

Listen, dipshit, there are millions of women who have NO choice at all whether or not to work or whether they CAN work at all, if they are over 55. It isn't they are working "too much"--it's that they aren't working at all or are working too few hours. They don't have cushy little lifestyles with well-to-do husbands as a safety net. More often than not, they have NO safety net at all, especially women without spouses or children.

How about stopping this insane obsession with a negligible number of wealthy or upper-class women in elite fields and start caring about people on Main Street?

Who CARES What "Elite" Women Are Going Through

when there are tens of MILLIONS of people who are suffering economically in this country? Who gives a shit about privileged people who live in a bubble utterly clueless about how the 99 percent of us live? We have to somehow feel sorry for them when they have had every advantage to get ahead, not because they are better and more "intelligent" than the rest of us.

It's just disgusting and cruel to even focus on their "plight" when the rest of us ARE having it terribly. It's a giant disconnect.

Who frankly cares if these women, who seem to have a huge entitlement mentality, have "it all" when many of us have little or NOTHING? I am just as educated and intelligent as these people, but most of them had connections to get where they were and are or are trust fund brats who think they worked hard when they actually were born on third base. They have spouses who make equally obscene amounts of money, so they also have that safety net. They are firmly in the top five percent, if not in the top one percent, of all household earners, and they whine about how hard they have it? PLEASE.

I have written many times on this blog that the "elitism" criticism of feminism was the only criticism against it that was valid because it was the truth. This argument was made mostly by women of color who felt their views were not represented, but they were correct. Too much focus was on women who were born into privilege and too much focus was put on women to crash "men's" jobs while denigrating traditional women's jobs or lifestyles in the process. The focus should have been on improving the lives of ALL women, not just catering to a tiny number of women who went to "elite" colleges (e.g., the Seven Sisters colleges, Ivy League universities).

I DO feel like I am in a time warp:

The conversation came to life in part because of a compelling face-off of issues and personalities: Ms. Slaughter, who urged workplaces to change and women to stop blaming themselves, took on Ms. Sandberg, who has somewhat unintentionally come to epitomize the higher-harder-faster school of female achievement.

Starting a year and a half ago, Ms. Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, injected new energy into the often circular work-or-home debate with videotaped talks that became Internet sensations. After bemoaning the lack of women in top business positions, she instructed them to change their lot themselves by following three rules: require your partner to do half the work at home, don’t underestimate your own abilities, and don’t cut back on ambition out of fear that you won’t be able to balance work and children.

Oh, for fuck's sake. What these dimwitted self-styled "feminists" seem to forget that companies exploited greater female participation in the labor force starting in the 1970s by gutting MEN'S pay and undermining unions so that male pay was on par with female pay, thus getting TWO workers for the price of one. This ended up being the "two-career" family, not households made up of two executives, two attorneys, two doctors, or whatever two-profession households there were. That wasn't the second wave feminists' fault; they simply didn't see it coming and trusted corporate America implicitly to do right by women. Poor fools. Women now had to "do it all," but so did their husbands, if the women were married at all. Nowadays, companies simply move the jobs overseas or bring cheap labor to this country in order to shore up their profits and undermine living standards here.

Second-wave feminists never saw any of this coming. Apparently neither have third-, fourth-, fifth-wave feminists or whatever wave they're in these days seen it.

The focus needs to be on the economy and the massive redistribution upward of wealth, not on relatively minor issues, because these matters affect EVERYBODY.

Child Abuse

You would hope parents have children for the right reasons and would do everything in their power to make sure their children's welfare was most important on their minds. However, there is at least one narcissistic mother who thinks making some kind of political or social point is more important than being concerned about exploiting her kid in order for a magazine to sell copies or get hits on their website.

I am, of course, referring to "the" cover of the latest issue of Time. It is absolutely disgusting and borders on kiddie porn, frankly. You want to be an overprotective mother and breastfeed toddlers, fine. Just don't do it in public and don't shove it in my face.

Not to mention there is an anti-feminist message being peddled. Women aren't good enough no matter what they do. The "standards" for being a "perfect" woman become more and more unrealistic.

This guilt-tripping of women hasn't changed one iota for fifty years or more.

Etc.

There are now just two candidates for the CMS sup job, as Kriner Cash has pulled out of the running.

Morrison was offered the job instead of longtime administrator Ann Clark. Bullshit does go a long way in this business.


The "Dear John" letter:

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to you today to provide you with an update about the search for a new superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina. I wanted to write you as a colleague to tell you personally about the situation.

During the last three years, I have had the privilege of serving this community as superintendent of the Washoe County School District. This wonderful community has welcomed and embraced my family and me from the day we arrived, and we have treasured every moment we have spent here. We love Northern Nevada, and I love being associated with the tremendous people of the Washoe County School District. I have been committed to the work we are doing here in Washoe County to improve the quality of education for all our children and have always said I would be happy to spend my career here.

As you know, I was asked to be a finalist for superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in Charlotte, North Carolina. The reason I agreed to seriously consider the potential opportunity in Charlotte when, over the past several years, I have said, “No, thank you,” to other such opportunities, is both family-related and professional. My wife and I have family near Charlotte, and I have a deep respect for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools as an educational system.

Last week during the public interview process, I had the opportunity to meet the great people in Charlotte-Mecklenburg and learn more about the community. While I enjoyed that process, I also continued to think about the strong relationships I have built in Nevada and the amazing work that is happening in WCSD. These relationships are what have made this decision such a difficult one.

This morning, I was officially notified by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Board of Education that I was being offered the position as superintendent pending successful contract negotiations. After considering all factors – both personal and professional – and spending time in deep, thoughtful reflection during the entire process, I have decided to move forward in the process. This decision has weighed heavy on my heart, but I believe this opportunity is the right one for my family and for me.

I came to Washoe County School District because of a school board dedicated to making bold, courageous decisions for the 63,000 students in Washoe County schools and because of a community wanting a high-quality education system to make a difference in the lives of our children. One of the reasons I know I can accept the position in Charlotte-Mecklenburg is because of the foundation we’ve created together in Washoe County School District. Our educational improvement efforts have never been about one person. It is about the 7,400 employees who are all dedicated to “every child, by name and face, to graduation.” I know progress will continue in Washoe County School District because the Board of Trustees, our educators, and this community remain committed to the direction in our strategic plan, Envision WCSD 2015 – Investing In Our Future. I am confident WCSD is going to be a district that the community, the state, and the country will continue to be proud of.

I appreciate the confidence and faith the Board of Trustees has shown in me. The leadership the members of the Board have demonstrated through some difficult times has been tremendous. It is essential for the community to realize how fundamental the school board has been in the positive changes happening across Washoe County.

I would like to thank every employee in WCSD for their efforts. This school district is led by an outstanding and highly-qualified executive team that will continue to work toward fully achieving every goal set out in Envision WCSD 2015 – Investing In Our Future. Our schools are led by dedicated principals who will continue to push for excellence. Our classrooms are filled with talented teachers who do extraordinary work every day educating our children. Throughout the District, staff is committed to giving every child the best education possible by providing support and assistance to our families. Their hard work is truly to be applauded.

I also would like to thank the entire community for its support. From political leaders across Washoe County and the state to our local businesses, parents, and employee associations, words cannot express how much I appreciate your support and involvement in the public education system. The welcoming nature of the entire community and the kindness extended to me and my family will never be forgotten.

Making this announcement today is bittersweet for my family and me. While I am looking forward to working with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the district’s employees, and the community to serve its 140,000 students, I am saying goodbye to amazing colleagues and a community that has rallied behind Washoe County School District and its efforts to create a better education system for all children. I truly feel blessed for my time here in Northern Nevada.

This was an incredibly difficult decision. However, I can say without hesitation the passionate work of educating all children in Washoe County will carry on.

Thank you for everything you do for our children every day.

Sincerely,

Heath

Press conference:



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I don't know how serious this proposal is. After all, AFDC was predicated on the idea that single mothers would and should stay home with the kids when they were small.

I can predict the GOP's reaction: It's okay for wealthy women to stay home because the taxpayers aren't supporting that choice (well, not directly, but there are all kinds of tax breaks people on a joint filing get) while taxpayers are supporting poor mothers. Besides, we know poor people have kids because of those generous public benefits. Calling staying at home "work" would merely encourage more poor mothers to have kids.

Of course it's bullshit, but the GOP is so predictable.

Ann's Choices

Much is being made about Ann Romney and her choice to stay home and raise her five sons. Of course she could afford to do it regardless of her religious bent, but it is true that the Mormon faith does encourage women to stay home and raise kids and eschew work outside of the home.

There are Mormon women, plenty of them, who are in the labor force, however.

What is more problematic in my opinion is the religious sect's relentless pressure on Mormons to marry and preferably at a young age.

Years ago, 1980 to be exact, there was a good book written about these very issues, Patriarchs and Politics: The Plight of the Mormon Woman, by Marilyn Warenski. Although it is an old book, it is still relevant today.

No doubt the Romneys' religious beliefs will be held under much scrutiny.

One of the All-Time WORST Articles

It makes me wonder what in the hell are the standards of magazines these days. There are always these articles trying to brainwash women into thinking they should do this, or they should do that, or else if they don't do this or that, they are deficient in some way.

In the old days, it was the "women's" magazines that were guilty of such rot. Now we have "newsmagazines" with articles written by women are not feminists to begin with extolling the virtues of sadomasochism or "submission" as if it were some "liberating" act rather than it being something kinky or downright perverted.

Of course "submission" is a code word or euphemism in religious circles for subservience.

What kills me is Katie Roiphe is actually the daughter of a well-known feminist from the second wave, Anne Roiphe. It looks like the apple fell far from the tree, and it is full of worms.

I will make sure I do not buy a copy of this article.

This isn't the first time Newsweek has gone off its rocker when it comes to women and lifestyles. Years ago, in 1986, I believe, it printed that now debunked article which claimed never-married women over 40 had a better chance of being knocked off by terrorists than of getting married.

Arguing Among Elites

The WSWS takes a look at the silly Rosen-Romney debate over women's roles. Hilary Rosen, as everybody knows, apologized the other day for making her tactless remarks about Ann Romney never having worked a day in her life. It was a cheap shot the way it came across. More tactfully and accurately, Rosen should have said Romney hasn't held a job outside of the home, and she wouldn't have made a goddamned fool out of herself.

Anyway, it was all a bunch of silliness, for Rosen has a lot more in common with Romney in terms of socioeconomic status than she has with people like me who are struggling in this economy. I have always said the biggest problem feminism or the women's movement had was with the criticism that they were and still are elitists who haven't a clue how the average woman "out there" lives. Much of that criticism came from women who were in minority groups. The criticism hurt because it was true. Feminists always talked about women's need in getting those degrees, making inroads into male-dominated jobs, and "balancing" work and family, and while those were and are worthwhile goals, they aren't terribly relevant to the 90 percent of women who aren't in the elite professions.