Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. Not many of those who fought in that bloody epic conflict are still around. We should salute those who are.
Do you think a world war on that scale could happen again? Would we be capable of the same sacrifices, both on the battlefields and on the homefront?
A tribute to the anniversary after the jump. (more…)
Amnesty International, the respected human rights group, has taken up a new cause: the legalization of prostitution world-wide.
Libertarians have long supported this, for, well, libertarian reasons. Now expect liberals to embrace this goal as a way of empowering women (which is how Amnesty International frames it). But would it really empower women? Wouldn’t this also, in effect, legalize human trafficking?
But this would be yet another step in our hypersexualized culture’s quest for total, unrestricted sexual license. (more…)
Now that gays have won the right to marry, the tune is changing. Instead of the view that homosexuality is a fixed, permanent, non-alterable state, the word now, including among gays, is that sexual preference is “fluid” and exists along a continuum.
Kinsey’s scale, ranking people somewhere along the continuum of exclusively heterosexual (zero) to exclusively homosexual (6), has come back, with everybody in between to some degree or another being bisexual. (Watch for a new trend of people sharing their numbers in this sense.)
How could young people have such high rates if sexuality is genetically or biologically determined? Could a hypersexualized culture have something to do with it? (more…)
The government, through the Securities & Exchange Commission, has passed a regulation requiring that all publicly-trade companies have to publish the ratio between how much the chief executives get paid as compared to their average worker. On the other end of the pay scale, a number of Democrats are pushing for and some local governments are implementing a $15 per hour minimum wage.
Do you think these policies will reduce income inequality? Should the government be meddling in salary decisions with no regard for how the marketplace sets wages and prices? (more…)
The decline in the size of families–from 3.5 to 2 children in 50 years–has also meant fewer cousins, fewer children in neighborhoods, and fewer relationships in general. That means, according to Ted C. Fishman, that we need to recover friendships, which are also in decline, even though having friends is important on all kinds of scales of well-being.
I would throw in that part of the problem may be the way friendship, which is often a same-sex relationship, has been sexualized by the homosexual movement. So called “queer theorists” in academia are interpreting virtually every close friendship on the part of historical figures is evidence that they are gay. And the counseling and support groups in schools often encourage young people who have the intense friendships often characteristic of adolescence to think they must be gay. But one of the most beneficial qualities of friendship, according to the classic authors, is that it is a close personal relationship that specifically is not sexual.
Teachers, who have big clout in the Democratic Party, don’t like standardized testing, a major reason being that it often provides evidence of their ineffectiveness. So Democrats generally support gutting No Child Left Behind, George W. Bush’s education law designed to make sure that children who perform poorly get the help they need. Republicans, who are usually against a federal role in education, are mostly OK with scrapping the law.
But now civil rights groups are arguing that mandatory testing is a matter of civil rights. Poor and minority students have a right to an education, they argue, and mandatory testing identifies the students who need extra help and makes sure school systems don’t ignore them. (more…)
