Gifford Pinchot visiting students at School of Forestry Camp at Gray Towers

[This entry was first posted here on June 12, 2012. It’s still an interesting story. Perhaps the Forest Service has since changed, but it seems unlikely.]

TWO YEARS ago, I posted an excerpt from a book-in-progress, The Death of the U.S. Forest Service by Christopher Burchfield.  Since renamed The Tinder Box: How Politically Correct Ideology Destroyed the U.S. Forest Service, the book was published by Stairway Press earlier this spring.

Burchfield has more than fulfilled the promise evident in that excerpt. The Tinder Box is an outstanding work of investigative reporting and cultural criticism, a blow-by-blow account of how the U.S. Forest Service, with its millions of acres of cherished timberlands, was transformed from one of the most effective and highly motivated government bureaucracies in American history to a rancorous, dysfunctional and despised workplace, a bureaucratic hellhole more preoccupied with egalitarian quotas and sexual harassment seminars than its mission to preserve and govern this country’s vast woodlands.

Burchfield, who has held jobs in the Forest Service, other government agencies and IBM, spent months poring over government documents and interviewing employees of the Forest, amassing a small mountain of evidence. Anyone who doubts that feminism severely damages the morale and initiative of men, and is inherently opposed to the pursuit of excellence, is encouraged to review this evidence. This story is so disturbing, pointing as it does to an environmental disaster of significant proportions, it is sure to be ignored by the mainstream. And that is a crime. Read More »

HEATHER MAC DONALD describes a study of 371 colleges and universities conducted by the Cornell Institute for Women in Science based on three hypothetical applicants for tenure-track positions in science:

The job-search packages for the applicants included a search committee’s report, quotes from letters of recommendation, and an overall numerical score. The academic qualifications of two of those hypothetical candidates, a male and a female, were equal. A third male candidate was slightly inferior to the other two.

The nearly 900 faculty members, half male, half female, from all four fields preferred female applicants over identically qualified males by two to one. Only male economics professors showed no gender preference; female economics professors chose the female candidate by a ratio of two to one.

JESSE POWELL writes:

MARY M. writes:

There are traditional ways for patriotic women to support the military without joining. Somehow those traditional forms of support have been forgotten or demeaned in the rush to push women into combat. Read More »

A LOYAL READER writes:

I recently watched a TV show (I suppose you would call it a sitcom) produced c. 1971 or ’72. Office setting. A female employee discovers she is being paid $200 a month less than the man who had the job before her. Confronting her boss, she is told this is naturally because he had a family to support. Outrage. Fast forward to the present. Within a few days of this I had a daughter tell me of a similar situation involving her employment in the past month. My instinct tells me you would find offering the man more who has a family to support justified. (Forgive me if I’m wrong.) MY instinct tells me it is justified. But for the life of me I can’t make a case for it in my head. IS it justified? I have the greatest respect not only for your judgement but your ability to clearly define principles. Thank you. Read More »

A picture of Jane Austen by her sister Cassandra

HISTORY is filled with bright and cultured women who never went to college. Jane Austen, to cite one example, had no formal schooling after the age of eleven. Austen was born in December of 1775. According to the Wikipedia entry on her life:

In 1783, according to family tradition, Jane and Cassandra were sent to Oxford to be educated by Mrs. Ann Cawley and they moved with her to Southampton later in the year. Both girls caught typhus and Jane nearly died.[24] Austen was subsequently educated at home, until leaving for boarding school with her sister Cassandra early in 1785. The school curriculum probably included some French, spelling, needlework, dancing and music and, perhaps, drama. By December 1786, Jane and Cassandra had returned home because the Austens could not afford to send both of their daughters to school.[25]

Austen acquired the remainder of her education by reading books, guided by her father and her brothers James and Henry.  [26] George Austen apparently gave his daughters unfettered access to his large and varied library, was tolerant of Austen’s sometimes risqué experiments in writing, and provided both sisters with expensive paper and other materials for their writing and drawing.[27] According to Park Honan, a biographer of Austen, life in the Austen home was lived in “an open, amused, easy intellectual atmosphere” where the ideas of those with whom the Austens might disagree politically or socially were considered and discussed.[28]

Strange, that Austen’s father saw to her education. As we know, from reading Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf and many other feminists, fathers back then, for all intents and purposes, hated their daughters and wanted to keep them as stupid as possible.

One wonders what kind of person Austen would be if she had been born 18 or 20 years ago and was an English major taking courses in textual analysis at an Ivy League school today. Instead of wandering through a private library, content to follow her own way through Shakespeare, Milton and Sophocles, with the loving supervision of her father, she would be grinding out papers on interspecies dialogue or great African authors or on the role of women in ancient Chinese poetry. And even Jane might be getting drunk on weekends or having naked trysts in library stairwells. After all, human beings can only rise so much above their circumstances.

Poor Jane. She would never be able to probe her great, God-given subject: the tension between the sexes. She would be relentlessly informed that the sexes don’t exist. How then can there be tension between them? There is now only tension between the age when the sexes were believed to exist and the age, enlightened and liberated, when they do not exist. Issue closed. What more can one say?

Jane would be silenced.

Perhaps she would be one more bit of walking proof that spending $200,000 on a fancy education can, however much it may equip you for the job market, actually make you dumber.

SAILORS were once known for spending their leisure hours in brothels in foreign ports. Okay, they were not just known for it. They actually did it. That, for better or worse, was considered compensation for hard work and long hours at sea. Things have changed dramatically. Now men in the Navy have much less incentive to visit these fleshpots. On many naval ships, as much as 40 percent of the crew is women. And, there is plenty of opportunity for sex with shipmates. News flash: The typical naval vessel is becoming more and more like your average college dorm.

In his interesting and candid article “Co-ed Crew: Reality vs. Taboo,” in Proceedings Magazine of the U.S. Naval Institute, Capt. Kevin Eyer writes:

[I]t would not be unusual for you to be glad, believing that your Navy has grown up into a service no longer sullied by raw, alcohol-fueled lust. You may reasonably think that the Navy is a professional and sober organization in which the worst elements of human weakness have been stamped out. Certainly that is the image that leadership jealously promotes and guards.

But you would be naïve to believe this mythology. You see, human nature has not changed, and water inevitably finds its own level. So, even despite the Navy’s ever-increasing efforts to legislate morality (or perhaps because of it) sailors have discovered new ways in which to be, well, sailors. Over time, they have largely replaced those historic foreign dalliances with that which is more expedient and close at hand: sex with their shipmates.

Read More »

CHARNETTE MESSÉ had an abortion and used oral contraceptives. She believed these led to breast cancer in her thirties. In this video, she discusses her experience. As far as I know, it is not possible for Messé to have known conclusively that either the abortion or synthetic hormones caused her cancer. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that they did and that these factors have led to the deaths of many others. Messé died last December.

Here is a video about the risks. According to the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer, five women have successfully sued abortion doctors for failing to warn them of the risk.

Read More »

IN THIS recent entry, readers discussed anecdotal evidence that a baby boom has occurred in some affluent, predominantly liberal white communities. This may be true in certain areas, but recent census figures suggest the trend is not widespread. As Jesse Powell reported previously, in the ten wealthiest zip codes discussed by Charles Murray, author of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, fertility and family stability all declined between 2000 and 2010. In Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, a suburban town of multi-million dollar homes large enough to accommodate families of ten in style, the number of white children went from 859 to 788 and the proportion of white children living with both of their natural parents went from 91.7 to 87.9 percent. In Chappaqua, New York, another “Super Zip Code,” the number of white children went from 3,585 to 3,355 and the proportion of those living with their own parents declined from 93.6 to 92.5 percent.

Of course, the deterioration was far worse in communities farther down on the economic scale, as has been documented here many times. However, this class divide does not represent a true cultural divide; rather it is the reflection of disparities in intelligence and inherent levels of restraint.

Murray believes that at least some stability can be returned to places where single motherhood and divorce are now common if America’s ruling classes preach the values of marriage and stigmatize illegitimacy again. As I wrote in this previous entry,

[Murray’s] notion that there is a great American divide is problematic. America’s elite does not believe in sexual restraint. It does not believe in traditional sex roles any more than America’s working classes. The well-educated simply suffer less from the consequences of the cultural revolution. How could they possibly preach what they don’t themselves endorse?

Read More »

IN RESPONSE to the post about the proposal in India to require husbands to pay their wives salaries, a proposal that is seriously being considered for a nation of over a billion people, thus proving that there are few unworkable fantasies beyond the  imagination of modern, collectivist bureaucrats, the reader Forta Leza writes:

Here’s a thought experiment: What if a law were passed mandating that wives must cook at least five fresh dinners per week and do at least two loads of laundry per week? Or what if the law required that wives offer their husbands sexual relations at least once a week? Surely feminists would be outraged. And they would correctly note that under normal circumstances, the state should not get involved in peoples’ marriages. Which is exactly what is wrong with the wife salary proposal. Read More »

AUGUSTIAN PAULDURAI writes:

The Women and Child Development (WCD) ministry of India is planning to introduce a policy that would require husbands to pay a monthly salary to their homemaker wives!

The cabinet ministers have recently approved a marriage law amendment bill that will empower women to initiate no-fault divorce and get a share in the property (an incentive) acquired during the marriage. The holy Bible says [love of] money is the root of all evil. The feminist-controlled Indian government is trying to divide and destroy families by bringing money into family relationships. Read More »

DAVID BROOKS, another human hot air balloon, writes glowingly today of Hanna Rosin’s new book on the “End of Men.” Brooks lends support to her theory that men are lagging behind their former employment and academic success rates because women are more “fluid” and “adapatable” in the modern economy. Men just don’t get it. He writes:

Rosin is not saying that women are winners in a global gender war or that they are doing super simply because men are doing worse. She’s just saying women are adapting to today’s economy more flexibly and resiliently than men. There’s a lot of evidence to support her case.

Brooks makes no mention of the 50-year feminist campaign to remake our schools and regulate the job market. Nothing about the millions of dollars in fines and damages companies have paid for failing to comply with sex discrimination laws. Nothing about the rewriting of history so that every male achievement is suspect or any musing over whether men could be, I don’t know, demoralized?

Not a peep from Brooks on these remarkable changes, or on the grotesque aggression and self-centeredness of the modern woman careerist. Nor does he truly lament the declining employment rate of men. Women are doing “super,” according to the “conservative” Brooks, as if women could ever be “super” while dumping men and children by the wayside.

Read More »

I DID not watch a single moment of the Democratic Convention during prime time last week. I did, however, later view some of Sandra Fluke’s speech, which you can see here. Rarely has the socialist project to denigrate womahood been presented in such glowing terms. It’s too hysterical and adolescent of a speech, the sort of thing you’d expect to hear at the Women’s Resource Center at any university or college, to take seriously. As Lawrence Auster says, “The human mind is designed for the contemplation of reality, not for the contemplation of sheer insanity.” It’s sheer insanity to view Fluke as a champion of women.  She is an avid proponent of their manipulation, unhappiness and corruption. And, truly, a childless woman who lectures the nation about the need to prevent birth is suffering from an insane level of presumption.

The Democrats scored two public relations victories against the Catholic Church. In the first, Caroline Kennedy presented herself as Catholic in her pro-abortion speech. Kennedy apparently believes Catholicism is hereditary and has nothing to do with what one believes. Kennedy is an airhead; she’s a human hot air balloon. Read More »

THE MAIN subject of this video by a reader named Kimberly is “ecological breastfeeding,” a way of naturally spacing one’s children which also, and more importantly, is the best way to feed an infant and young child.

Kimberly also does a great job in the video of explaining why she prefers to call herself a housewife, instead of a “stay-at-home mom.” She was radicalized by this website. Read More »

JAMES P. writes:

Here’s a way to respond to people who make snarky comments about large families. Hand them this article, “A quarter of women ‘wish they’d tried for children earlier’” in The Telegraph by Stephen Adams. Read More »

THE FEMINIST writer Shulamith Firestone, a feminist luminary of the 1970s who argued that pregnancy and childbearing were “barbaric” and entailed female oppression, died in Manhattan on Tuesday. In an obituary in The New York Times, Margalit Fox discreetly reports that Firestone was clinically insane.

In addition to her famous 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, which I read as a college student and in which she advocates artificial reproduction and state-supported childcare, Firestone wrote Airless Spaces, a quasi-fictitious memoir of her experience as a schizophrenic. Fox writes:

In “Airless Spaces,” Ms. Firestone writes of life after hospitalization, on psychiatric medication. Read More »

FEMINISTS, such as Anne-Marie Slaughter, often claim that  companies have an obligation to create an equal number of positions for men and women because equality is profitable. The expenses of accommodating women employees in demanding jobs, so the argument goes, are ultimately compensated. If employees devote much less time to their jobs and are often distracted, productivity increases.

This fantastical argument, rehashed in Slaughter’s latest piece in The Atlantic, defies common sense. It has also been refuted. See British academic Catherine Hakim’s long report on the subject.

Despite the many forces pushing equality, there is virtually no organized resistance to this flawed thinking and the coercive project of workforce quotas. There is promising news, however, from Britain. A businessman, Mike Buchanan, has started a new organization, Campaign for Merit in Business, to resist “positive discrimination for women.” He writes:

The reasons for the ‘imbalances’ between the numbers of men and women in the senior reaches of organisations in general, and in the boardroom in particular, are very well understood, although not widely understood. They’re attributable (as are phenomena such as the ‘gender pay gap’) to the choices freely made by men and women with regard to the world of work and have nothing to do with discrimination against women.

Read More »

PENNY writes:

Your recent entry on women who want to have it all made me think of the author Emilie Loring. She wrote romances from the 1930s through the ’50s. Her heroines were spirited, can-do women who tried to make the world a better place. They had a sense of humor, were loving, and believed in family. The heroes were hard-working men who, like the heroines, placed duty above personal desires. Read More »