While single herself, the always belligerent Ann Coulter seems to have a bit of a grudge against other single women — single mothers in particular. In a recent appearance on Fox and Friends, Coulter complained that the Democrats — and the media — were paying too much attention to what women think, and suggested that Romney could win the election without appealing to women — or at least to single women.
Ronald Reagan managed to win two landslides without winning the women’s vote, but it is as you say, it’s striking, it’s not the women’s vote generically, it is the single women’s vote. And that’s because single women look to the government to be their husbands and give them, you know, prenatal care, and preschool care, and kindergarten care, and school lunches.
Huh. Well, this might answer the central question in that National Review piece we discussed yesterday — why Romney isn’t getting 100% support from women, even though he’s the sort of rich guy alpha that evolutionary psychologists suggest is inherently appealing to “hypergamous” (i.e., golddigging) women. Turns out these women are already married to Obama!
The notion of government as a “substitute husband” is, of course, an old Men’s Rights trope. Warren Farrell devoted roughly a third of his Myth of Male Power — the 1993 tome from which the Men’sRights movement still gets most of its talking points — to explicating this particular theme. And it’s one that MRAs today return to again and again and again and again. (The notion of the “husband state” also, not coincidentally, played a role in the sprawling manifesto of mass killer Anders Breivik.)
As for Coulter, this isn’t the first time she’s singled out the single ladies. In a recent appearance on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox, Coulter went after Obama and the Democrats for focusing on what she called the “stupid single women” vote. “And I would just say to stupid single women voters,” she added,
your husband will not be able to pay you child support. If Obamacare goes through and Obama is re-elected, you are talking about the total destruction of wealth in America. It is the end of America as we know it. …
Great, you will get free contraception; you won’t have to pay a $10 co-pay, but it will be the end of America. Think about that!
Coulter is so miffed that single women don’t like Republicans that she’d be willing to give up her own right to vote if it means these “stupid … women” wouldn’t be allowed to vote either. As she once famously explained,
If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream, it’s a personal fantasy of mine, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women. It also makes the point, it is kind of embarrassing, the Democratic Party ought to be hanging its head in shame, that it has so much difficulty getting men to vote for it. I mean, you do see it’s the party of women and ‘We’ll pay for health care and tuition and day care — and here, what else can we give you, soccer moms?’
Here’s a much more appealing take on single women. Well, honestly, it’s as terrifying as it is entertaining:
Nanasha: Depending on where you live, you may be able to register on the day of the election. There are eight states (Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Wyoming) which allow it, and California may be about to become the ninth.
If California passes is (almost certain), it won’t take effect until after this year’s elections.
It’s not just the poorer parts of town which have these sorts of issues. I live in on the East Coast now, and there are two groceries in walking distance, but one is a lot more expensive than the other (even though they are owned by the same parent company). Some of it is subtle (the yogurt costs the same, but the sizes are 20 percent smaller). So it’s pretty much one, if you have any desire/need to keep costs down.
There is a club store, but you have to have storage space for the bulk food purchases; and it’s no Costco.
Cat fountain killed me. XD
When I spent a summer in Philly, there was a good (but expensive) grocery store on my way home. And yet I still subsisted mainly on Hot Pockets because I didn’t have a usable kitchen; the one I shared with 6 other people was covered in dead/dying mice and the owner didn’t do anything about it. And there was something larger dead in a wall, I think, that made an unholy stench. Even aside from food deserts, there are reasons that a school lunch might be better than homemade. FSM knows what kind of crap would have infected me if I used the kitchen I had “available.”
Reading the Sav-a-lot horror story made me very thankful for a) the UK’s food hygiene standards an b) I was using my laptop on the loo when I read that [/TMI], because I thought I was going to hurl. My maths teacher taught me to throw up on the lino rather than the carpet.
And I submit to you more bizarre things you can do with cats in video games:
http://thesims2.ea.com/exchange/pet_detail.php?asset_id=50066&asset_type=pet&pid=Exchange_pets&hideFramework=&languageCode=
(For some reason I wound up crying with laughter when I saw this. I think it’s the combination of the picture and the description… part of me wants to stick it in my game because it’s so stupid.)
The fountain of kitties works. Also @Myoo:
GORDON’S ALIIIIVEEEEE!!!!
Here in the coastal town where I live in CA, having a garden is a moot point- most gardens (even ones in backyards) get pilfered by the massive street people population. There are a lot of people I know who tried “food not lawns” in their front yards who gave up after their first year was over because they’d come out in the morning to a front yard that had been trampled by these people, needles left among the tomatoes and even human waste where they copped a squat in the middle of their foraging expedition.
And in my hometown as a young girl (and even now), my family would spend weeks and weeks in the summer canning fruit. We made graven-stein applesauce from scratch. The work was grueling, take all day long, and was hot as hell for a yield of maybe 8-10 quarts. We have about 8-10 different fruit trees (two different types of apple, two different types of peach, plums, cherry plums, apricot, nectarines, and a couple others that have long since died on us after an inopportune frost), and a small garden area where we tend to grow tomatoes, beans, squash, corn and melons. We also have a kickass artichoke plant that’s given us years of tasty artichokes.
As my parents get older, the maintenance of these trees has become much more difficult for them, and a lot of the fruit ends up falling off and spoiling on the ground. And we have bumper crop years and lean years as well- it’s never 100% consistant. My dad supplements this by buying from orchards, but you still have to BUY IT and can it before it goes bad. Canning is a great supplementation for going to the grocery store if you have the time and energy to do it, but it *IS* expensive and time consuming and requires a good amount of knowledge of what the hell you are doing to do it right (and, if you don’t do it correctly, you can get botulism or your food can spoil in the cans because you didn’t achieve a proper seal).
….and remember, this is in CALIFORNIA, which is one of the best climates/locations to grow pretty much anything. So it’s not feasible AT ALL in many parts of the US and internationally.
Plus, in the apartment where *I* currently live, there’s no way to have a garden of any sort. The only part of the complex that gets reliable sun is the paved part of the driveway where the cars drive. The backyard is so shady that nothing grows. And the closest “community garden” is too far away to be a part of it. We have CSAs here in CA (they send out seasonal veggies for a fee), but once again, it’s supplemental, not a full replacement for going to the grocery store.
Food insecurity is one of the biggest problems that our modern society must deal with, and in CA, I’ve noticed that adequate housing is also a huge issue. You have two old people living in 5 bedroom houses and multigenerational households living in a 1-2 bedroom apartment. Housing costs have collapsed a lot since the housing bubble burst, but they’re still ridiculous compared to the average income. You see vacant houses everywhere, just decaying.
I currently pay $975 a month for a one bedroom apartment. Most one bedroom apartments in this area of CA cost over $1200 a month. The two bedroom apartments start off at $2100 a month, and many are in inaccessible, unpleasant and unsafe areas, and they don’t allow a cat (we have one).
Utilities are much more reasonable here because of the mild weather (I pay less than 50 bucks a month), but it can easily run you a lot more if you have a big, energy inefficient house and you live in the hot baking valley areas.
I still find it strange that we live in a society where if you want to live a basic life, you have to slave away for money. It just seems like a horribly inefficient and indirect way of doing things. In fact, I have found that if you were to pay via taxes instead of out of your pocket, it would actually be less expensive because you have to pay for these things with your taxable income, which you already had to pay taxes on. So with health insurance premiums in the US, you make X amount of money, that money is taxed, then with the money left over, you must pay your premium. If you lived in a country with socialized medicine, your “premium” would be removed in taxes, so your money would actually go FURTHER. I don’t understand how people can’t seem to realize this fact.
I know we’ve come a long way since the preindustrial age, but as a species, we have a LONG way to go before we can honestly say that humans are properly civilized as long as there are still people who want for basic shelter and nutrition.
>there is no demand for supermarkets to provide healthy food because no one would buy the food.
Either this person is not serious or he/she lives in some really strange country… like Sealand or something.
In Florida, you could theoretically grow something all year round, but the soil is so porous and skinny that if you don’t container-grow, you’re just making salad for bugs. A good year, I’ve made some prime peach jam, and we’re talking half a standard bushel making five quarts (and our peaches are dry, apricotty little things that boil down less than most). Chickasaw plum won’t bear unless you have two from different stocks; the fruits, no bigger than moderate cherries, are strongly aromatic but require a lot of sugar for jamming and grow on twigs that are really cleverly-diguised THORNS. But most years, the bugs will get it long before you.
South Florida, someone could get a good source of protein from one avocado tree – even dogs and cats like them- but again, it’s seasonal. I know of no way to preserve avocados.
I have one rooster who lives in my house. That aside, our local foxes, some of whom climb, outfox us every time.
How can a society thrive if its children don’t?
In some ways, I don’t have a dog in this fight, because I’m childless and will very most likely remain that way. I’ve never wanted children, biological or adopted. But I want our children to thrive, to have enough to eat, safe homes, good health care, good free public education. And the GOP has done nothing but attack those goals. That idiot Newt Gingrich suggested that children serve as janitors in their schools to earn breakfasts and lunches. The Religious Right has been attacking public schools because they want to set up their own schools that teach religion and don’t teach evolution, funded by taxes. One official (in Arizona I think) freaked out when she realized that those school vouchers she had fought for could actually be used for a Muslim school. Of course she had assumed that only Christian schools would be allowed.
The GOP has consistently attacked public education, unions, science, our limited social nets, the rights of women. IMHO they don’t care about the working and middle classes. Not that the Democrats are doing a great job either, but they’re better than the GOP.
As for why more single women vote Democratic instead of Republican, I don’t know. To me, it’s the right and smart choice and that’s all I care about.
South Florida, someone could get a good source of protein from one avocado tree – even dogs and cats like them- but again, it’s seasonal. I know of no way to preserve avocados.
The trick is to not harvest them. Until they leave the tree they can’t ripen. Short term inhibition can be done by collecting a length of branch; bearing at least two leaves.
I think I know what town you’re talking about. My condolences. 😉
That was Louisiana, actually, where they passed a law allowing all kinds of nutjob religious “schools” to get taxpayer money instead of preserving that funding for the public schools:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/06/valarie-hodges-lawmaker-retracts-support-for-bill_n_1655249.html
They already get away with teaching religion in public schools in some places. My 7th grade science teacher taught us that dinosaurs never existed, and that any dinosaur bones shown in museums were really pig bones. Abstinence only education is also religious indoctrination in public schools. The Religious Right’s goal is to spread everywhere and teach their crap in every school, if they can’t get the public schools shut down for lack of funding anyway.
“(1) We need far more STEM related education than what we have now. I’d go as far as to say we need to curtail some of the other degree problems to make room for this. In this manner people are prepared for the jobs of the future.
(2) I like Germany’s Green initiative where they made owning solar panels profitable. I don’t agree too much with a completely subsidized model of the government paying you to have/buy panels (that money has to come from somewhere and once that subsidy starts it never stops) but rather an initial government funding project of designing really cheap solar panels and then having companies sell the panels at a low cost to consumers. The company then pays the government back for using the rights to the designs the government funded.
(3) Restore all funding for NASA and make sure that anything NASA comes up with is patented, etc. People are free to use whatever technology they come up provided they pay a royalty fee to NASA in return.
(4) Make it such that the universities must provide any and all loans for their students. This forces the university to make sure the student succeeds and not just hand that person a diploma.”
All this sounds great, TMason. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that you’ll never get to where you say you want to be by going in the direction you’re headed. The suggestions you list above can only be followed by people who live in a wealthy society. Wealthy societies are not composed of people who are desperate and broke. Societies which channel all the money upward end up harboring moneyed cul-de-sacs in which all the rich citizens are rich together, but such societies themselves are not wealthy. The wealthy people in the moneyed enclaves aren’t going to need STEM education. They don’t have to worry about the jobs of the future b/c they don’t have to worry about the jobs of the present. What they do have to worry about is their money, because their money is what sets them apart from the hoi polloi; therefore it’s of intense, and logical, concern to them that they be able to access the lawn-mowing and leaf-blowing and pool-cleaning and horse-training services of their social inferiors at the lowest possible rate. These are not the people who are going to fund NASA. Once in a while a rich geek may build a spaceship as a hobby, but that’s going to be about the extent of the upper-crust interest in outer space.
Too many geeks who have won the lottery in the brains department tend to identify with one-percenters who won the lottery in the bucks department. It may take brains to get rich, but just having brains doesn’t equate to being rich, nor does it mean that the people who are already rich are going to identify with you or will be impressed with your brains or will be ready to pay you for using them. It’s an ill-considered identification and it’s one without a basis. If you honestly want what you say you want, you’re going to have to prove less-eager to throw middle- and working-class people under the bus, and that includes the female ones.
Pecuniam, it works to a degree, but they do fall off branches after a while. It’s thought they evolved to be glunked by certain large mammals that no longer exist, and their pits later randomly planted in their own little capsules of fertilizer. That no longer happens, but assorted critters drag the nutritious fruits around and nibble the soft parts, so then volunteers happen.
I believe the pits are also nutritious. The same is true of the good-tempered and undemanding loquat, whose quite soft_shelled pits can be added to the jam batch about fifteen minutes before finishing, which causes them to develop an almond-like nuance that is delicious with the apricotty loquats. If these pits are cooked much longer, they lose the almond taste and resemble garbanzos, so they are quite good in anything savory.
This thread has been massively entertaining to lurk on. Thanks guys! After one or two tedious comments I skimmed TMason’s contributions and just read the responses. But I gather Hitler Youth = OK, free school lunches = BAD CHILDREN WITH YOUR PHYSICAL NEEDS >:-( and Cooking. The hardest thing, dontcha know?
Usually when people invoke “the children” when they want to tell us bitches to STFU and get back in the kitchen. Invoking the kitchen itself is kind of a new one. So points for originality?
TMason, I’m probably not going to read your inevitable and long-winded response to this because I too am a married lady with a baby (and vote for a party which would be considered unimaginably far-left if it existed in the US) and I have better things to do, but if you want a picture of what cooking was like back when people DID grow their own food et al, I recommend “Never Done: A History of American Housework” by Susan Strasser. Here, buy it on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0805067744/ref=redir_mdp_mobile
Or do you only read books printed on paper from trees you cut down and pulped yourself?
Reynardine: In climes (such as California) the semi-determinate nature of the trees is such that a modest variety of them will allow the harvest to last year round.
The worst thing (if one likes avacado) is the squirrels, who bite into them on the tree, decide they are nasty and leave them to rot when they fall/are picked.
The avocado is nut, though I don’t know anyone who eats them. I’ve dried and carved some.
Make it such that the universities must provide any and all loans for their students. This forces the university to make sure the student succeeds and not just hand that person a diploma.
WTF?
Are you talking private or public state universities?
What makes you think universities are qualified to be banks (or even have the resources)?
Public universities get their money from (primarily) state funding of various sorts (which has been going down), tuition, and fees.
Or are you talking about government money being given to universities to disburse rather than to the banks (who made a fucking gazillinoaire’s profit off student loans)?
And why loans, instead of grants, etc?
I’m blessed with a yard and endless tomatoes now, but I’ve lived in multiple apartments where you could not grow anything, period; there was negligible indoor natural light and everything outside got broken by kids with basketballs (accidental, but still inevitable). We had a setup with a grow light, but that’s a hobby: you’ll never save money with hydroponics (unless you sell pot, of course).
It’s my impression that canning and preserving are only worthwhile if you grow your own food (or get discounted produce from another source); fresh produce is more expensive than canned goods at a supermarket so you’ll always lose money if you preserve things you buy.
The farmers also benefit from school lunch and breakfast programs, as well as the students. In fact, the Midwest Dairy Council and the state of Missouri have even made a challenge trying to increase student participation in the school breakfast program, especially in districts where there are more low income families. The more kids get school meals, the more milk the dairy farmers sell. It’s a win win situation that helps a lot of people for only 70 cents per breakfast.
This comes from the local Fox News, sorry it’s Fox, but it’s not as bad as national Fox News
Also, note that 60% of students in Joplin qualify. Joplin has over 7,000 students in the district, so think of how many kids would probably go hungry if it weren’t for the school breakfast and lunch programs. The school officials want higher participation so that more students can be well fed, which helps them get better grades and test scores, and that helps the schools get more state money.
I feel like I’m preaching to the choir here in showing how these programs are beneficial, but what the hell. Maybe some lurkers will decide to support their local schools free and reduced meal programs because of this thread. Or at least if they know how many students are in need, they will at least always vote yes on school bond issues and buy candy bars from their local PTO’s.
Katz, do you never see that dreaded omnivorous green accordion, the tomato hornworm? They also like eggplants, peppers, and daturas. I saw one at least a hand long gallop off with a half-grown patio tomato in its mouth. Those that escape the wasps grow up to look like a flight out of Kitty Hawk.
Incidentally, should girls take home ec? Yes, and so should boys. Should boys take shop? Yes, and so should girls. Paying other people to do stuff for you isn’t feasible for most of us starting out, and if you know how to put up shelves, repair your clothes, paint a wall, cook and keep food that won’t kill you, understand exercise and nutrition…etc…you’ll live a better quality life and have something left over for the fun stuff.
Hornworms grow to be pretty moths. They are, despite the voracious appetite, attractive.
@Reynardine
I agree. My father would never teach me to drive a manual transmission, change a tire, or change my own oil, because I’m a girl. it sucks!
fembot: I made my girlfriends learn to drive stick. I owned stick, and if I got hurt I wanted them to be able to get us up/to the hospital.