It's A Fraud All Right

7 federal prosecutors were fired during the Bush administration because they raised objections to wasting precious resources looking for voter fraud when they knew there was next to none. 

The rest of the Justice Dept looked.  At a cost of several tens of millions of dollars.  They found 30 cases.  Most of those were explained away by people who had completed a prison sentence, and then voting in a state where they couldn’t anymore.   Now, completing a prison sentence normally restores voting rights.  But for these former prisoners in the few states where voting rights disappear for good, some few people didn’t know that and attempted to vote.  30 people, out of 250 million.  So one has a greater chance of being struck by lightning than voter fraud happening.

Is there some evidence that I am missing?  Because unless I am, it appears that campaigns against “voter fraud,” campaigns manifesting as highly restrictive, obstructive, bureaucratic roadblocks that use “anti-voter fraud” as cover, appear to have a sinister motive.  As in taking away a person’s right to vote (Constitutional violation of a fundamental/foundational right).

Energy For Non-Reality and Little to None For Reality

There was a recent Korean study of people who played computer games more than 30 hours per week.  The subjects reported they couldn’t reduce their playing even though they wanted to.  When they were given an MRI while shown things that reminded them of the game, their brains had virtually the same reaction as drug addicts when shown something about their addictive drug. 

As psychologists and sociologists have been warning, to no avail, the country is awash in an epidemic of obsessive video gaming.

Neil Postman said over twenty-five years ago that we were going to amuse ourselves to death.  One of the questions I have, though, is: How much is the allure of virtual reality, and how much is the depressive outlook of so much of reality—that the society is offering little real opportunity, let alone truly exciting avenues, for what should be the up and coming?

The Boxer Who Never Took a Month Off to Rest, The Woodcutter Who Never Sharpened His Axe

Post World War 2 America inserted itself into every manner of international involvement, and that injecting of itself into center stage demanded much from a people and a society. 

The American people did not deliver, either domestically or internationally.   They remained in the main unengaged and uninterested, acquiescing to interventionist impulses of those they put in power and then promptly ceased vigilance on.

As strategies and strategists go, pretty much a failure.  The most they would get from a generous but unbiased grader is a D- or D, but that would be due more to lucky events and the inherent flaws of enemies than to forethought and will.

The US has blown the lull period.  Sure, in the Cold War.  But beyond that, especially, when so much money and effort should have been made to rest and recuperate and even advance.  Instead, we got bases, intervention, power projection, and general militarization, along with money funneled in effectively corrupt trainloads to defense, intelligence, “security,” etc. contractors.  We built navies and air forces that not only were largely effectively unused (and certainly not for vital American interests), but wouldn’t have been regardless, probably even if they had been the right type and amount (and they were neither).  We DO need a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) naval force for addressing piracy and keeping open the seas, but little else.  We MIGHT need a UNSC air force. 

There IS no perfect security.  Everything you do to make your country MORE secure militarily comes at a cost—a steep cost—to the very economic and social health that is the true power of your society. 

Can our Framers look any wiser?  Or we any more foolish?

Historians are not going to be kind…

Where did all the men go?

“I am tired of meeting BOYS who tell me what they think I need to hear, make and break promises, and aren’t ready for something serious.  If you are dealing with unrequited love, childhood anger, or emotional dismissiveness, stay away.  I have dealt with many people who carry baggage and seem to think it is okay to ‘put themselves out there.’  Two words…Get help.”

The above frustrated female poster to an online forum might at first appear to be singing the same dirge of frustration at males’ commitment avoidance as has been sung for many years.  But it’s a bit more involved than that.  On to the (or rather, an) analysis!

America men wait longer and longer to get married, on average, than they used to.  No longer are the majority of men married by their late 20s.  The reasons are likely complex, despite all the tie pullers on inflammatory radio who would have you believe in a (their) single cause. 

Yes, young men may have paid attention to how marriage has become in a culture that throws so much burden on the nuclear family and gives next to nothing in support of it.  Even when divorce hasn’t been the observed result of years of slogging, marriage may not look all that appealing, especially with the selfish undertone of the culture poisoning the well.  And that’s even without the observed woman or women being controlling, manipulative, or any of the other things examined previously in this forum, which would obviously throw a big negative bone into the mix.

That the young men (extended boys, really, in many cases) are often socially stunted, is in little dispute.  Whether it’s the proverbial “playing video games in their (indulgent) parents’ basements” for the same endless hours a drug junkie devotes , or other evasions of manliness and responsibility, socialization is lacking.  Without socialization, semi-isolation is too easy, especially with the pseudo-connectedness (and pseudo-reality) of the internet—and all amid a culture that seems to teach or at least okay manipulation, exploitation, and other things that poison honest relationships.

Their average testosterone has also taken a nosedive, and that only accentuates most of the problems.  Difficult to be the complete man when the very foundational hormone that both makes someone a man and drives nearly every aspect of physical and psychological make-up, is lower.  Add to that the atrocious nutritional quality of much food and drink, and it only magnifies the problem.

In the female-dominated social structure, men, married men especially, and fathers in particular, are portrayed as stupid, foolish, simple, malleable, etc.—the target of jokes in sitcoms, comedy routines, and real life.  THERE’s certainly some low bar expectations to live down to—or avoid altogether.  A lack of respect also gets reciprocated by the way.  You ladies who are wondering where the Mr. Darcy’s, and Noah’s, and others of romantic literature are—while your expectations may have perhaps always been a bit excessively magnified due to literature’s ideal portrayal, your chances are often slim of getting even a remote semblance if respect is missing from the cultural equation.

Economically, the real job prospects, and especially the exciting ones, have gone away for probably a majority of men in the culture.  Few things are more emasculating and depressing to a man than having his work identity gutted.  Evasion of the society that wants to give him no good options, or force him into poor ones, doesn’t look quite as completely irresponsible as it might have before considering that.  Even when he can find a job (FAR less than a certainty today), the chances of finding one at a livable wage (and mostly forget about one that can provide for two or more people) are much reduced.  And that he knows that he alone can’t care for a wife and children, does something to his psyche, probably unrealized.  If the women in Grapes of Wrath were looking at and testing their men to see if they’d given up, perhaps many young men today have—deep inside their psyches—given up before they start.

That there is a general underlying feeling of driftlessness, shallowness, off-the-track inertia in this culture only reinforces the problems exponentially.

William Bennett has a new book out (“The Book of Man”) about the demise of manliness.  It’s a start.  We need a discussion on it, and a whole lot of related subjects in this culture.
 
Are there other probable causes of the changes in young men’s behavior?  Certainly.  We may have barely scratched the surface.

Only the fact that the human pair-bond is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, chosen relationships around, keeps marriage in the running.