A TROUBLING COLLECTION: Who Is Teaching Your Kid?

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CAMILLE PAGLIA: A Feminist Defense Of The Masculine Virtues.

She starts by pointing to the diminished status of military service. “The entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on, none of them have military service—hardly anyone, there are a few. But there is no prestige attached to it anymore. That is a recipe for disaster,” she says. “These people don’t think in military ways, so there’s this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we’re just nice and benevolent to everyone they’ll be nice too. They literally don’t have any sense of evil or criminality.”

The results, she says, can be seen in everything from the dysfunction in Washington (where politicians “lack practical skills of analysis and construction”) to what women wear. “So many women don’t realize how vulnerable they are by what they’re doing on the street,” she says, referring to women who wear sexy clothes.

When she has made this point in the past, Ms. Paglia—who dresses in androgynous jackets and slacks—has been told that she believes “women are at fault for their own victimization.” Nonsense, she says. “I believe that every person, male and female, needs to be in a protective mode at all times of alertness to potential danger. The world is full of potential attacks, potential disasters.” She calls it “street-smart feminism.”

Ms. Paglia argues that the softening of modern American society begins as early as kindergarten. “Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It’s oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys,” she says, pointing to the most obvious example: the way many schools have cut recess. “They’re making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters.” . . . By her lights, things only get worse in higher education. “This PC gender politics thing—the way gender is being taught in the universities—in a very anti-male way, it’s all about neutralization of maleness.” The result: Upper-middle-class men who are “intimidated” and “can’t say anything. . . . They understand the agenda.” In other words: They avoid goring certain sacred cows by “never telling the truth to women” about sex, and by keeping “raunchy” thoughts and sexual fantasies to themselves and their laptops.

Indeed. You could write a whole book on this.

MICHAEL BARONE: America’s market sector develops skills our education system leaves untapped.

In a post-Christmas blog post my indefatigable American Enterprise Institute colleague Jim Pethokoukis points to a study that shows that no economy in the world rewards smart, skilled workers more than the United States. the study, by economists Eric Hanushek, Guido Schwerdt, Simon Wiederhold and Ludger Woessmann, and published by the National Bureau for Economic Research, quantifies the return on numeracy skills for the U.S. at 28 percent, significantly ahead of Ireland, Germany, Spain and the U.K., which range between 21 percent and 23 percent. Korea, Canada, Poland and Japan hover below 20 percent.

Pethokoukis argues that the higher returns come in “economies with more open, private-sector-based labor markets.” He goes on to ask, “Wouldn’t this seem to argue that higher U.S. inequality — based on pre-tax, pre-transfer market incomes — reflects 21st century market forces rewarding ability rather than some sort of breakdown in social norms.”

To this (seemingly rhetorical) question I would answer “yes,” and would go on to say that it tends to confirm the thesis of my 2004 book Hard America, Soft America. In it, I contrasted Hard America — the parts of American society in which there is competition and accountability, and Soft America, the parts of American society in which there isn’t. K-12 education, in my view, is part of Soft America; the competitive market economy is part of Hard America.

When Americans emerge from Soft America at age 18 (or at age 22 or so, when they emerge from college, which Geoffrey Collier’s piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal says is pretty Soft too), they don’t measure up well next to similarly aged people in many other advanced countries. But when they get into Hard America, where skills and smarts are well rewarded, they shoot ahead.

There might be a lesson there, somewhere.

SHERLOCK HOLMES is in the public domain.

SPENGLER: The End of Erdogan’s Cave of Wonders: An I-Told-You-So. “Except for the state of Israel and a couple of Sunni monarchies that survive by dint of their oil wealth, we are witnessing the unraveling of the Middle East. The best we can do is to insulate ourselves from the spillover effect.”

EVEN YOUNG CHILDREN can distinguish between fantasy and reality. Which is more than you can say for school administrators who can’t distinguish between a real gun and a pop tart.

HOPEY-CHANGEY: Making Ends Meet with “Reverse Shopping.”

CHARLES HOSKINSON: Who are the losers in the ‘Duck Dynasty’ flap?

The winners: Robertson and his family.They held fast to their values and learned how deep their fan base really is. The family’s admission of regret about his statements to GQ was no surrender, given that his comments were never about hate as opponents had insinuated.

The losers: A&E executives, of course, who knew all along that the Robertson family members were conservative Christians, yet did the world’s worst imitation of Claude Rains in “Casablanca” when gay groups complained.

And while we’re on that subject, the other big loser is GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination, which showed how far it had strayed off the path of encouraging tolerance into the dark woods where conformity is enforced by witchhunts and demands for blood sacrifices. GLAAD’s intolerance sparked what its leaders called the worst backlash they’d ever seen — a backlash that included prominent members of the gay community such as Andrew Sullivan and Camille Paglia.

That’s right: Two groups of smug, urban sophisticates got outsmarted by a backwoodsman who shoots ducks for a living.

Heckuva job, folks.

Heh. And some people are going after GLAAD’s corporate funders, like Wells Fargo.

WAR ON MEN: 11 ‘Girly’ Things Men Wish They Could Do Without Judgment.

THINGS JUST GET WORSE FOR THE AMERICAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION: Trinity College profs issue letter supporting Israel boycott, but less than 10% sign.

Also: Harvard and Yale Slam American Studies Association Over Israel Boycott.

But criticism is one thing. Defunding conference attendance and ending publication purchases is what will alter future behavior. And that’s what these New York legislators are after.

THERE’S NOTHING UNDIGNIFIED ABOUT HONEST WORK: Law School Grad Forced Into Retail Job Blogs The Loss Of His ‘Last Shred Of Dignity.’ Check your class privilege, dude.

ACCOUNTABILITY: Federal Judge Finds Corps of Engineers Inept, But Immune.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘We Are Creating Walmarts of Higher Education.’

Universities in South Dakota, Nebraska, and other states have cut the number of credits students need to graduate. A proposal in Florida would let online courses forgo the usual higher-education accreditation process. A California legislator introduced a measure that would have substituted online courses for some of the brick-and-mortar kind at public universities.

Some campuses of the University of North Carolina system are mulling getting rid of history, political science, and various others of more than 20 “low productive” programs. The University of Southern Maine may drop physics. And governors in Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin have questioned whether taxpayers should continue subsidizing public universities for teaching the humanities.

Under pressure to turn out more students, more quickly and for less money, and to tie graduates’ skills to workforce needs, higher-education institutions and policy makers have been busy reducing the number of required credits, giving credit for life experience, and cutting some courses, while putting others online.

The thing about WalMart is, it offers a lot of value for the money. Besides, it’s all women’s fault. “The same percentage of men (7 percent) major in the humanities today as in the 1950s, but women’s interest in the humanities has dropped dramatically.” If men were abandoning the humanities, it would be because they’re philistines — dumb lunks only interested in making a buck. But since it’s women, there must be a positive reason for the change.

SHOCKER: Man gets between Chuck Schumer, TV camera — and survives!

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NEW FRONTIERS IN CARBON-CREDIT TRADING.

WAR ON MEN: “When a man masturbates in public, it’s creepy and it’s criminal and women feel at best grossed out and at worst violated. When a woman masturbates in public, it’s …. a really funny article for Cosmoplitan?”

HEH: A&E Admits it Ducked Up – will bring back Duck Dynasty Star.

INEQUALITY: Why Some Women Complain About Not Having Orgasms When Hooking Up. “Women who complain that their hookup partner did not care enough to bring her to orgasm should understand that they can’t have it both ways. Blame it on evolution.”

GOVERNMENT HEALTHCARE: “So… the way we’re supposed to see that the greedy corporations aren’t bilking us all is for more people in their care to kick off? Noted!”

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: “Romantic love is truly wonderful in the appropriate context, but we have elevated it beyond all sanity.”

SO NOW THERE’S A SPLIT: Federal judge calls NSA phone surveillance programs legal.

SHOCKER: New Study Exposes Acupuncture As Pseudoscience. I think the reason the Chinese government pushed it so hard under Mao was that it was cheap, not that it was effective. . . .

20TH CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Surviving Life In A ’70s Sex Commune. “The whole system was not about people but really about power. He was not allowing people to have relationships, he was separating the kids from the mothers he wanted more and more power.”