JESSE POWELL writes:

In January 2013, the most recent month for which U.S. Census data is available, the Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) of all women in the United States from 25 to 54 years old stood at 74.0 percent.  This is the lowest rate since July 1991 when it stood at 73.9 percent.  The LFPR for women first hit 74.0 percent in September 1989. The peak in women’s LFPR was in April 2000 when it touched 77.3 percent.

For men in the same age group their LFPR was 91.7 percent in April 2000 and 88.6 percent in January 2013.  This means from April 2000 to January 2013 men’s LFPR dropped by 3.1 percentage points and women’s LFPR dropped by 3.3 percentage points; about the same amount.  So it cannot be said that there is a return to traditional sex roles going on with men increasing their participation in the workforce to match the level of earlier years and women leaving the workforce because now their men are taking care of them; only the women leaving the workforce part is happening.  Still women leaving the workforce on a sustained basis as appears to be happening is totally new.

From 1870 to 2000 women’s participation in the workforce continually increased; a trend of at least 130 years ever since record keeping on the subject began.  Now since 2000 women’s participation in the workforce has declined to where it was in 1991.  This kind of regression is totally unprecedented since 1870.  From 1870 to 2000, every single decade saw an increase in women working; usually of a substantial ratio.  The growth in women working was slow from 1990 to 2000, but was rapid for all the decades preceding 1990, even during the recession of the 1970s.   (more…)

AT New English Review, Nikos Salingaros and Ramray Bhat argue that reductionism has drained the vitality from cities:

A city is a complex multilayered system, teeming with components, very much like a biological organism. Following the Second World War, architects and planners instituted a top-down approach to planning and constructing the city that reduced it to simplistic components (Salingaros, 2000). (more…)

  I HEREBY PROPOSE that the position of First Lady be declared defunct. The role of presidential wife has been trashed. There is no turning back. We should henceforth refer to the woman in the White House as "Most Exalted Wife and Gorgeous Goddess of the Universe."  Please salute her armed guard of female soldiers.

DANIEL S. writes:

The Mohammedan jihad against the Coptic Christians is no longer contained to Egypt. Over a hundred Coptic workers in Libya have been arrested on trumped up charges that they were engaged in Christian missionary work. (Video of the Coptic men is available here.) As to be expected the Egyptian government has done nothing to see to their release. (more…)

SAM writes:

In his famous book, The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, the psychologist Oliver Sacks described a phenomenon called “alien leg syndrome.” Someone suffering from this malady fails to perceive one of his own legs as an integral part of his body. Such people might, at times, try to toss a leg out of bed and thereby tumble onto the floor. This is treated as a pathological condition by the medical health community. (more…)

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A FRATERNITY at Emerson College in Massachusetts has raised more than $18,000 to pay for surgery for a female student. The purpose of the surgery? To remove the young woman’s breasts. Donnie Collins, who has been admitted to Phi Alpha Tau, will undergo the operation so that she will have an easier time pretending she is a man. They call it “sex change” surgery, but that’s just a fancy name for barbaric mutilation. A confused young woman will maim herself with public approval and support. Higher education in America is breathtakingly evil.

This nauseating story — and the reports you see daily about transgender freaks — is one manifestation of the willful obliteration of sex distinctions. Feminism, which glorifies masculinity in women and confounds the sexes, leads with inexorable logic to voluntary mastectomies.

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  KARL D. writes: I came across this article in the Daily Mail and thought you might find it interesting. It seems China has a class of women called "Leftover Women" who can't seem to find a man to marry. The reason for remaining single (as posited by the article) is that these are highly accomplished career women who are turned down by men for the simple reason that they are highly accomplished career women. The men seem to want a more traditional domestic housewife and one who is not the primary breadwinner. That is saying something in a country where there is a big shortage of women to begin with.

IN ANOTHER decided triumph for anti-family feminism, the Republican-controlled House reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act today, expanding the draconian domestic violence bill to cover homosexuals and prosecution of non-native men on Indian reservations. This marks the third time since December that House Speaker John Boehner has moved a bill off the floor without majority support from his party.

VAWA expired last year and underwent serious and vocal opposition. But the “war against women” threats prevailed. Though the majority of House Republicans voted against the bill, eighty-eight members joined 199 Democrats to approve it.

The bill authorizes $660 million a year in funding for battered women’s shelters, domestic violence programs and victims’ advocates. Here is Phyllis Schlafly on the bill, first enacted in 1994:

In its 17 years of operation, [VAWA] has done little or no good for real victims of domestic violence, while its funds have been used to fill feminist coffers and to lobby for feminist objectives and laws. Although every spending bill should be subject to rigorous auditing procedures in order to curb waste and fraud, VAWA has somehow ducked accountability for the nearly a billion dollars a year it doles out to radical feminist organizations. (more…)

THE resignation of Pope Benedict XVI makes no sense to me. It is similar to a father appearing to his children one morning and saying, “Look, I am getting old. I am resigning from this position.” At Tradition in Action, Atila Sinke Guimarães makes this point and says Benedict’s resignation has turned the papacy into a job. He writes:

Someone told me a comment of a simple woman off the street about Pope Ratzinger’s abdication. She said: “I considered him to be my Father; isn’t this what a Pope is? But how can a father resign from his mission? A father is always a father, just as a daughter is always a daughter. It is a reality inherent to the person … it is impossible to resign from this. It is absurd.”

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GRATEFUL READER writes:

In honor of the conclusion of the reign of Pope Benedict XVI, a lecture about his work is in order. This short lecture given by Dr. Nicholas Healy of the John Paul II Institute, comes at a critical point in our age. (Scroll down near the bottom of the page to find The Reception of Dignitas Humanae in John Paul II and Benedict XVI on Friday at 9:00 am, beginning at 39:30 minutes) Dr. Healy discusses Pope Benedict’s view of religious freedom, which he shares with Blessed Pope John Paul II and The French School of Catholic theologians. (more…)

WRITING in The Greensboro Guardian, Dr. Ada Fisher, a black physician from Durham, North Carolina, remembers fondly the years of her childhood, when blacks largely lived in their own communities. She writes:

Reminiscing with my fellow baby boomers, it is not uncommon to hear folks say in many ways we were better off during segregated times than we are now — integration stripped away a history which was the base of our foundation as well as that for this nation.

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ADAM TAXIN has set up a page here. It’s not an official page at this point, but it’s a good start.

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VIRGINIA MESSICK was an Air Force recruit in training at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas in April 2011 when Staff Sgt. Luis Walker instructed her to meet him in a dorm room during a cleaning detail. He then “proceeded to rape me,” according to Messick, who tells her story in this New York Times video, a consummate work of propaganda, complete with a close-up shot of Messick’s engagement ring.

Let’s get this story straight.

Messick was in training to be a soldier. She was in the military. And yet she did nothing to defend herself in a safe and secure building in friendly territory against a man who demanded she engage in sexual intercourse. According to her own account, she did not scream out. She did not punch him and run away. She did not push him to the ground. She did not even tell anyone for months. She was psychologically intimidated because Walker was her superior. But why would someone with as little assertiveness as Messick be of value to the military, except perhaps to clean toilets, make beds or answer phones?

Walker is now serving a 20-year sentence for assaults against ten women recruits, none of whom apparently possessed the ability to defend themselves. It is perfectly normal for women to lack the ability to defend themselves against men. But if that perfectly normal state of affairs were recognized for what it is we would not have women in harm’s way in the military and we would not have a public outcry against sexual assault in the military. Certainly Walker’s behavior was a disgrace, but he is not the only one guilty of wrongdoing here. Our military leaders are accomplices for their utter failure to resist the feminization of the military. For every year Walker spends in jail, the commanders who have smoothed the way for people like Messick to be in training, and who believe that men and women will work in intimate quarters and never interact as men and women, should serve two years. And Messick herself is guilty for viewing the military as a place simply to get ahead and establish a career and for her failure to refuse to obey Walker’s orders. Shame on her. I don’t have an ounce of sympathy for her. As I have said before, women join the military not to defend their country but to destroy it.

Get a load of some of the photos of Messick in the video. Someone who poses in this way sheds serious doubt on her innocence. But then the entire Lackland assault case is an exercise in un-reality. Only by disregarding the obvious can we view the publicity surrounding this series of assaults as anything but a manifestation of mass delusion.

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NICHOLAS PELL writes:

Note in this chart published in The Washington Post that the top five jobs in which men are paid more than women are jobs in which people are paid for performance. Two more on the list fall into the same category.

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AS IF we needed further proof that the GOP is a dead party, 75 prominent Republicans, including four former governors and two members of Congress, have signed a Supreme Court brief in favor of homosexual marriage. The brief, filed in support of the challenge to California’s Proposition 8, which bans homosexual marriage, claims to represent family values.

There is no effective political opposition to leftist tyranny in this country.

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