Stuff around the net, plus rants

StrategyPage podcast discusses the root causes of World War I: blame Charlemagne?

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Freakonomics points out modern marriage, where "two incomes no kids" (or one or two kids) in the elites and the poor marrying each other have led to increase of income inequality...

actually it's worse because a lot of working class moms don't bother to marry the kid's daddies, because they can make more money off of welfare, and his job was exported to China...

Fracking could change this, but never mind.

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Someone in Florida said they supported immigration for cheap gardeners and maids.

Hungergames, says Instapundit. Nah, just third world economics. Lots of Pinays get jobs here, or in Saudi or in Singapore etc. as maids to support their extended families.

My take? We have maids and cooks here, but the only person I knew who had a full time maid in the US is the woman who hired my mom to do dressmaking and my brother to do the yard work.

Hello: Most American women do their own work and raise their kids on their own (which is why most women prefer to work part time).

Remember when the press wined and dined the ex boyfriend of Sarah Palin's daughter, so he could drop dirt on her, and his main criticism was that she forced her daughter to cook supper? It says a lot about the state of the MSM that they thought this was horrible, even though few Americans have maids and most of us who work and raised kids did expect the kids to help in the home...

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It's not just priests (although you might not know about these previous scandals).

The BBC report on how UKMail dared to point out that some very prominent folks there allowed a pedophile group into their "civil rights" organization in the 1970's and early 1980, including some who worked to lower the "age of consent" to 10...

Yes, in our medical school in the 1970's, a psychiatrist supported introducing children to sex. It was all the fad back then.

But in the UK, such charges are kept out of the papers, partly thanks to a strict libel law...and then there is the "gentleman's agreement" to keep such things out of the press, according to this report in the left wing/anti war Counterpunch... and there are more detailed stories on conspiracy sites that may or may not be accurate.

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The "wedding cake" controversy is being written up as an "anti gay" thing, but it's actually not a case of refusing to serve Gay customers: it is about publicly cooperating in an action that they view as immoral.

A parallel case would be a pizza parlor refusing to deliver to an abortion clinic or a restaurant refusing to allow the KKK or the Tea party to hire them for a meeting.

If these individuals came to be served as individuals, they would: but if they came and asked the restaurant to essentially support them in their actions, you have a different argument altogether.

As for cakes: I once saw a staff party where the cake was a naked woman...and the only woman in the office was their supervisor?
Would it be legal for the bakery to refuse to bake that cake?
What if you knew that the supervisor was black, and it was a chocolate cake?

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addendum: TheOtherMcCain blog notes that according to the daily beast the real problem with America is that porn actors are looked down upon.

 In the meanwhile, several more intellectual magazine essays are comparing America with Weimar Germany....

well, the difference was the the corruption in the Wiemar republic was pretty much limited to certain areas of Berlin, wheras you kids can see Miley Cyrus etc. in your living room.

To quote Arthur C Clark: I remember Babylon...

And if you don't think that is ironic, never mind.